Yeah, it’s summer.

Maintenance stuff more than rennovating stuff this weekend…I got all the tree limbs we cut a couple weeks ago (a metric sh!t-ton) and some more I trimmed Saturday all chopped up and burned.

I also cleaned up an old burn barrel site (glass, and tons of bailing wire for some reason) by shoveling it into feed-sacks and throwing it away…

Mowing got done…weedeating got done…

Oh, and we cleaned a bunch of trash out of our building on the square just for good measure.

A hot weekend for that kind of work…

I also fiddled more with the paint-sprayer…which I thought I had fixed but it is still not working right…this is a problem…I really need to spray some of these jobs to do it right…and the budget says I can’t buy a better rig at the moment…but this one is not cooperating. A date with a shotgun may be in its future…

There was a bicycle event in Clarksville this weekend…so there was live music on the square Saturday night…the square is very pleasant once the shade shows up…balmy, breezy. Texas summer night magic…

The band was Native Pride, a rock Band featuring Clarksville Native Wendell Davis. They are quite good and did a couple sets of great music.

Me and the wife spent a nice evening, arm in arm, sitting on a park bench on the square enjoying the breeze and listening to the music…

Music…a nice Italian dinner, a bottle of wine…

Yeah, Texas summer night magic.

Working hard and living well.

Hope y’all are doing the same!

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

Several things conspired. Lots of work at…well…work, not enough sleep (due to same), and also we got the wife’s car back from the body shop. All the extra running around simply added up to the fact that we weren’t ready to go Friday night or Saturday morning.

Then, as we were getting ready to go I got the call…one of the newspapers I help support had lost power. Work again.

Oh, and then there was the 100+ degree forecast for the weekend…

All this said, “Take the weekend off! Sleep late!”

Sleep late…a luxury I seldom indulge. Sounded really good to me.

To sleep, perchance to dream, ay…there’s the rub.

That’s Shakespeare, in case you didn’t recognize it.

So what did I dream of? Scraping paint. Broken paint sprayers, a yard I need to mow, and a mammoth pile of tree limbs I need to cut up. I haven’t worked that hard in months!

Sleeping late is exhausting work. I think I woke up sore!

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

Sunday, we trimmed some trees and did the final prep on the sunroom for paint. “Trimmed some trees” is actually harder work than it sounds…didn’t even get to all that need it…and still ended up with a metric ass-load of limbs to drag around and cut up/burn. For the curious…a “metric ass-load” is the equivilent of two American shit-tons. Anyway, that’s another story involving sharp whirring things and fire…and perhaps prefaced by the statement, “Hey y’all, watch this!” so I’ll save that for another time.

Anyway, Monday…I was going to paint the sunroom before we came home. Since I really expected to get this room done…oh…say…last friggen August…I was looking forward to finally spraying the primer.

Loaded up the Wagner Paint Crew plus with a very good quality primer, did a final clean and mask of the room, fired everything up, and viola…no paint.

The unit will not come out of prime mode. While IN prime mode the pump runs and returns paint via the return hose to the tank. When I put it in spray mode it continues to do the same. Sigh.

The troubleshooting guide for the unit lists several things and the fix…except on this one it says, “return unit to an authorized Wagner repair center”.

Great. And I followed…meticioulsy…the cleanup and storage instructions. There’s no reason it shouldn’t work…but it doesn’t. Looking at how it seems to work…and how the prime/spray valve “feels”…I expect there’s a bit missing from the cleanup/storage directions…namely don’t leave that valve on “prime” for long term storage.

Any repair at the “Wagner Authorized repair center” would cost as much as I paid for the unit I expect…so I guess I’m going to attack this mystery part myself (the prime/spray valve) and see what I can see. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? Pestilence? Famine? Dogs and cats sleeping together?

Oh, and of course it’s out of warranty. I have sprayed perhaps 3 gallons of paint with it.

Intensely frustrating. I don’t need tools that fail unexpectedly with little use/wear and this one is supposedly aimed/marketed at just my market/level of use…

Even more frustrating as I was VERY pleased with how this machine performed when I used it before. It made a very difficult painting job a snap…and since I have several more “very” difficult paint jobs to get to…I really need it to simply and without any drama…just work.

I’ll abscound with the wife’s dining room table tonight and take this sucker apart. I’ll keep you posted!

Oh…and a lesson learned…when starting up a airless rig that’s been sitting a bit…try water first (if spraying water-based paints). That way, if it doesn’t work or needs some repair, you don’t have any serious cleanup to do.

Me? I had as much cleanup to do as if I had painted the entire room.

At least the fact that it was full of expensive and messy white primer kept me from kicking it’s sorry ass clear across the yard…

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

Well…remember the one about scraping paint?

Yeah, we’re still there. We’ve done some other things…the standard yardwork, cleanup (this weekend was our town’s big cleanup week, which meant we could take some things to the city yard for disposal), and I’m certian we’ve reglazed at least one window pane.

But…The 2010 Clarksville Fine Arts Festival is coming up (and I expect to see y’all there), and that meant several things.

1) We are going to have a houseful of guests. That means getting at least a couple of the rooms of the house marginally habitable, right? After-all, we can’t really expect our guests to scrape paint, vacuum the room, and find a bed to set up…or can we? Hmmmm….
2) We wanted to finish the siding on the tower of our building on the square…at least for the most part. Since the courthouse is actually not in the the square’s center, that leaves our tower as a focal point…and it looked terrible. Now it looks better!

Anyway, haven’t posted much about the work on the house at this moment simply because even though it’s going on…none of it really yielded interesting articles and pictures.

We’re almost done scraping the sunroom. It looks truly cancerous now. I can’t wait to actually prime it. THEN you’ll have some pictures!

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

(sigh)

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

That is all.

Oh…wait…that’s a different movie. Ah well.

This weekend was a change. A real change. I’m not quite sure what to make of it yet. See, for the first time in like 4 months…it wasn’t raining (or 10 degrees!) all weekend.

Wow! Ground that doesn’t go “schluuuup” and suck your shoes off when you step on it. Birds can fly with their mouths open again (they would drown if they did it before). We can actually SEE the end of the backyard! There was sunshine on Saturday!

Unfortunately rain was scheduled for Sunday, so we wisely did NOT peel the roof back on the corner of the sunroom for needed repairs.

We did get stuff done though.

1) We scraped a lot of paint in the sunroom…there is more to do but it has reached that stage where it looks like it has a particularly disgusting form of cancer so that means it’s getting close. We should have it ready to paint with a few more days work. (I am SO looking forward to shooting that room with a coat of primer! The pepto-bismal pink trim and putrid yellow ceiling and walls are a bit much, even for my strong stomach.)

2) We got PRIMING done! WoooHoooo! We’ve been trying for a couple months to get the exterior French doors primed and the windowframe in the mudroom stripped and primed. I can’t mount weather stripping till the painting is done on that stuff and it’s been simply too wet/damp/cold. This weekend brought us one step closer to weather-tightness in the mudroom! Woot!

3) I helped a friend (Hi Larry!) install a new fan motor in one of his heat pumps. That was a success (nobody died AND he can still use the heat-pump). I’m pleased to report there were no aliens in the ductwork.

4) And I did some tool maintenance. Namely, I fixed the lower controls on the Left-handed Fargle-snorker. This means the boom can be operated from the ground as well as from the bucket. Mainly it’s a safety feature, but it’s also so that things (within the weight limit) can be lifted and also the bucket can be brought lower for easier in/out than climbing the boom.

Sooo…full power restored. That’s a good thing. I’ve a project for that machine next weekend! (should be some cool pictures!)

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

Instead, we concentrated on scraping the paint off the billion or so linear feet of beadboard in the sunroom. We hope to paint that room quite soon.

It’s a large room…but it seems to grow even larger when you’re on the ladder scraping paint off the ceiling. I think it started out being 27 feet long…after this weekend’s work it must be up to 50 feet or so!

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

If you pretend the sill has been painted the same color as the trim against the roof line (very dark slate blue), and that I’ve given that same piece of trim up against the roof a second coat…then I finished the painting this weekend.

Finished! Okay, yeah, I know…to really be finished I actually have to paint the sill….and actually put the second coat on the trim…but, well, small victories. Some color is on, and we can see how good it will look as we progress.

Also, well, it’s kind of cool that there’s no more pieces falling off this part of the house.

So, once again, I’m now ready to work on the windows. Lesse…..I pulled the first set of sashes on…(looks it up)…gad…February 19 or so. Next weekend will be roughly two months…8 weekends…of work…to get to the point where I can actually work on the windows themselves LOL!

It’s not really all that bad…1st off, the dormer is done. Everything is attached…all the cracked or severely weathered wood has been replaced…missing trim pieces (and wasp hidey holes) have been sealed up.

Everything was stripped to bare wood, primed, caulked, and painted. Shouldn’t have to work on this one much for a while.

We’ve also been wiring, and doing other stuff on those weekends as well…much cleaning and hauling away of junk too…we threw away several hundred pounds of vinal siding scraps that were stored UNDER the house for some reason…(better under than on LOL!)

All this was under the house…and this was the first cleaning. Second and third ones followed.

And just for grins…(and because it’s kind of exciting to have something that looks finished), a before picture for comparison.

More later!

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

The two major colors are on the dormer, under the eave and the scales.

Anything up there that is white is still in primer, I ran out of time that day.

Two colors left…a high white for some of the trim, and the darker color for the sills/sashes and some other highlights.

This picture is not the best for showing the color…it was in the evening and the sun behind the house was washing everything out…

Oh, and those aren’t runs on the white/primer above the windows…that’s an accidental shot whilst flayling around trying not to fall off the ladder…(not that I would ever…actually…look silly…on a ladder…)

Hopefully I can finish up the trim and get a good shot next week. Oh, and more work to go on the windows, obviously…

Electrical stuff also happened this weekend. More on that later!

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

Spent a lot of time on the roof today…in the 30-40 mph north winds, stripping paint off the fishscales.

Some of it was practically stripping itself.

Finished….this is a couple hours work…in biting cold, heavy wind. Brrrr.

Also, the first set of sashes is primed (second coat) and ready for some sanding, then perhaps, a final coat.

I also got the sills their first coat of primer, but I didn’t take a picture. All thoughts had by then scattered to the winds like so many paint chips. I was shaking from the cold by the time I got off the roof and put the boards back in the windows.

Next week, prime the entire dormer! Finish the first set of sashes! Woohoo!

I’ve been working on this dormer, the sills, and two of the six sashes for over 5 weeks now (on and off and weather permitting…I HAVE gotten other things done as well).

I’ll sure be glad to get this thing put back together and painted…

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer