Purge the Teal Green

I actually like the color teal.  For clothes, or an accent color in cardstock, or on Mariners jerseys.

NOT for carpet or facia boards on my house.

The facia boards on our house had begun to blister and peel, and the Webmaster and I were waiting for a nice stretch of summer sun to get outside and repaint them.  Unfortunately, this has been one of the coolest summers that the Seattle area has had in the recent past, with many an occasional rain shower.  So, now that school is back in session, the sun has decided to shine for us.  Which means that we have spent this Labor Day weekend outside painting.  Nana and Papa drove up to help on Saturday – Papa was up on a ladder, scraping and sanding the facia boards, while Nana was inside with the kids, keeping them from killing each other.

Our facia boards were in bad shape.  Once we really got to scraping the boards, this is what happened:

I could literally peel whole strips of old paint away off the boards to the bare wood underneath.  It was that bad.  This was on the south side of the house, which gets the most sunlight each day.  Our house faces east, and the north side of the house is very shaded, and our backyard is wooded enough that the west side of the house doesn’t get nearly the exposure that the east and south sides do.

The south side is where the peeling was the most obvious, and it was the first side that we attacked.  Papa and the Webmaster got it all cleaned off by scraping, peeling, and then sanding, and I followed with a first coat of primer.  By the end of a very warm day, the first coat of color had gone on.

Here is a close-up of the boards.  The new color is called Thunder Bay, and for those of you familiar with Stampin’ Up colors, it strongly resembles Blue Bayou, the In Color from a couple of years ago.

It still has the same dark effect as the old teal paint, but it looks so much cleaner and less brightly obnoxious.  It also goes well with the current very light beige-y color of the house itself, but I do already have a coordinating paint color picked out for the house (a very light gray called Quartz Stone), but we’re probably not going to get to that until next summer, at the rate the weather is going.  It looks like we’ll have all of this week and the next weekend to paint, weather-wise (forecasts are promising temperatures in the mid to high 80’s, nice and sunny).  It would have been nice to do all the paint all at once, but we will take what we can get, and if we didn’t get to the facia boards now, we would have probably had to replace them after another winter because they were so blistered and peeling.

So, as of today, the south side has been completely finished, with one coat of primer and two coats of paint (and we picked the Behr Premium Plus Ultra exterior paint, which has a primer in the paint itself).  It might need a touch or two of paint later, but it is done and looks very nice.  I have painted the west side once (it was in pretty good shape and only needed a little primer here and there), but it will probably need another once-over.  The north side has been scraped, primed, and has one coat of color on it, and the east is in the process of being scraped and primed.  We’ll see how far the Webmaster and I can get today.

And yes, we still have the Great Room Swap in progress – we have bought the paint for the boys’ new room!  I’m going with two shades of blue, with a darker shade painted on the walls with the doors and windows, and the lighter shade on the unbroken walls, which means the colors will alternate walls in the room.

All this work also means that the Webmaster and I are completely exhausted.  But this is work that needs to get done, and this is what owning a home is all about.

So, let’s see how far we can get today!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 5th, 2011 at 12:56 am and is filed under Family, Home Improvement.
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