Exterior update

So it turns out painting the exterior of a house is quite a job. Grueling. Why was I so surprised by this?

Overall the superhero of this story is my dad, who worked day after day for nearly 3 weeks. I worked on the weekends (on one particular weekend I worked two 11 hour days in a row, making going to work that Monday quite a drag) and put in an hour or two each day after work. Occasionally I even put in an hour of painting before leaving for work in the morning. I was pretty limited by light, If I get home from work at 6, there is only an hour and a half of good daylight left.

So really, despite how sore I felt from the hours I put in painting shingles, I can't hold a candle to the work my dad did. Don't get me wrong, I definitely had a good case of claw-hand trying to type at my computer after holding a brush in the same way for so many hours the day before (We pretty much had to brush on the entire paint job, as the texture of the shingles makes a roller pretty useless). But yeah, this wouldn't have happened without my dad's tireless devotion to getting a job done.

There were so many steps! Shingle repair, scraping the eaves all the way around the house, priming the metal drainpipes and aluminum windows (I decided I wanted all of the metal painted to help it look cohesive), reglazing all of the windows (I learned I have a decent skill for window glazing!), and probably many more steps I am not even remembering right now.

Besides my own limited time (I had literally just been put up to full time at my job, so I didn't feel comfortable taking any days off during the week) our biggest limitation was the sun.  Turns out the sun is a bitch. And painting in the hot sun (which by the way, as the front of the house is south facing, and there are no large trees or bushes remaining out front except the one rhododendron, there was basically always full sun on the front part of the house.) is just about the worst. You get tired and dehydrated, the paint dries too quickly on your brush, you start to hate everything.

An amazing improvement, right? I waited until golden hour to shoot the "afters". Clearly landscaping the front is still something we have to take on- though we have started putting in a front path as you can see in the picture above.

I also took on the project of removing the years of weeds in that front planter area. It's still a work in progress, but for the sake of comparison, it used to look like this: 

 I think overall, the back patio made the biggest transformation. The paint was peeling off of every board on the overhang when we moved in. It was definitely an eyesore. So much of one I resisted taking any pictures and now have a sorry lack of before photos. You can almost tell how old and peeling the paint was from this photo:

And this is the space now. The bright white overhang just makes the space feel so light and airy.

So that's the outcome of so many hours of my dad's and my hard work. What do you guys think?