September 18, 2009
Finally! It is finished. The house has been painted and it looks great. Despite all the difficulties of the customer service of Alliance Paint, I can honestly say it is terrific work at a reasonable cost.
The silver lining to all the runaround of Paige and Chris, the owners of Alliance, we ended up with two good painters who completed the job in three and a half days. I think Marco and Juan should have be running the customer service end of Chris and Paige’s business. The owners did not call timely to let us know how our actual paint days were cancelled. They did not call to tell us what the scheduled days were going to be. And when it came to the actual job being performed, it was an impromptu day when Rex and I least expected it, a day several weeks before the last schedule date was given. It could have been our warning that if the job was not completed by October, we would get our money back.
The silver lining to all this date bumping and jostling, the lack of phone calls and misinformation was Rex and I were able to experiment for weeks with different quarts of paint colors. We started with a white (as said in previous blog entry) with a gray trim. The door was Jasper (and remained so to the very end.) Our porch and deck color also were kept as the original Ranchero Red. Trim went from gray to sage to finally a very light yellow and the house color went from white to gray white to a light warm color that had the orange hue removed and darkened somewhat to match the trim. Marco and Juan spent last Friday until Monday afternoon on the job. It seemed it might be a disaster as the first application was way too light for the body and had to be remixed to the color we had chosen. But once everything was moving, we couldn’t be happier with the final result. We had a “walk through” with the painters after all was said and done. Rex and I used binoculars to gaze up at the second story, looking for missed places or blotches. We found very few. The door is perfect. The deck and porch are perfect. And the entire house makes for a warm and welcoming feel. I hope it keeps the warm feeling through our gray winters for many years to come.
Now for some pictures.
August 15, 2009
Next week, August 17-22, Rex and I are having our house painted. I am nervous about it, too. Today we pulled weeds from around the house. The man who does the power washing also came by. The porch and deck, which are made of wood, now have most of the paint stripped bare. Rex and I spent a good part of the week before last testing out paint on our house. The color for the house is Oyster White (7637) and is a warm white color. The shakes, porch and deck will be painted Ranchero Red (3044). The trim will be Mineral Deposit (7652) which is light gray, and the front door will be painted Jasper (6216), a dark green. All colors can be found at the Sherwin-Williams site except the Ranchero Red may be harder to look up. Anyway, we applied the paint to our house in test areas. I do like that white for the body. It should make the house look really bright and clean. The Mineral Deposit may be too light of a gray. Hopefully it will not be so light you cannot see it. Finally, the front door. Jasper. This is a very, dark, dark green. Almost black in color. It will be framed by the gray trim. We have shakes over the master bedroom window and the office window. Right now these are rain streaked and fading. I am hoping with the application of the Ranchero Red stain will turn out well. I’ve no idea though. I am not very good at visualizing this sort of stuff. My mother does much better when it comes to these design schemes.
A couple of weeks ago the temperatures here soared. The all-time records, high and lows for Seattle, were 0° and 100° in records dating back to 1891. On Wednesday, July 29th, the temperature soared to 103° with a nighttime low of (if I remember correctly) 71°. We baked and roasted. All our fans were humming. Windows up and down stairs were opened. There was no relief. The nighttime temperatures were too warm for the house to cool down. It was too hot to do much of anything except watch the Weather Bug and hope for clouds. Showers couldn’t get cool enough. I dreamed of going for a swim, a lake, a pool, my tub. All that week, July 27-31, we had inferno (90+) days. Finally, in middle of the following week, the weather broke and we cooled off into the high 80°s range. Last week and this week have been very pleasant with an average day temperature around 72° and a nighttime cool of 54°. Very nice. The bedroom cools off. Fans are no longer blasting and all feels normal. But it was sort of exciting to be in the hottest day on record for our area.
Today we got rid of our old sofa, a TV stand, and the huge Sony 32″ CRT TV. That thing was heavy. It took three men get it down the stairs and out into a truck. The fellow who took these things was a 37 year old male (unmarried–where are those women nowadays?) who rents a condo (a cheap one) in Seattle. Now the house is a bit roomier and the sort-of dining room area has only the old piano and a chest of drawers in it. I still don’t know what to do with that piano. And I really don’t know what to do with that area. *sigh* I am sure one day, we will figure it out. Soon all clutter will have been addressed in the downstairs.
February 3, 2009
Our house, now a year old to us, (it was built in 1999), has white tiled kitchen counter tops. Though I wash them everyday, the grout in between had built up some dark stains. So I decided to bleach them. Mixing together one quart of hot water (that’s four cups for those who’ve forgotten the equivalent), 3/4 cup of bleach, and a tablespoon of dish soap, I donned rubber gloves and scrubbed. The solution sat on the tiles for about 10 minutes. Then I rinsed them with plain hot water. Here is the result:
Before & After (Click For Detailed Image)
Before and after pictures always make me feel good, especially when I can see how the hard work pays off.
Keeping up with this larger house (1750 sq.ft. compared to 1050 sq.ft. in the old one) is proving to be a challenge. Each week my spring cleaning list shrinks. Some of the tasks are novel, like assembling the garage shelves. Other chores make me cringe, like cleaning the Levelore window blinds. I imagine it’s going to take some sweat to get every single blade of the twelve swiped. I must remember to pace this spring adventure and follow the old saying: the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. I do not wish to burn out.
