I was granted 3 guaranteed days off after being on a fire for 14 days. Usually we only get two but the regional forester has decided we've had a long season and that it's gonna last even longer. I'm recovering from a chest cold and another case of poison oak, so I haven't accomplished much this weekend besides eating and sleeping, and removing two weeks worth of hair from my body and face. After two days of sitting on the couch watching HGTV, I'm ready to get some work done.
This morning I watered my dead lawn to see what would happen. The good thing about dead lawns is that you don't have to mow them. Somehow, weeds still grow without water, so it needs to be weed-eated. Then I set off to go shopping for all my home improvement needs. I can't believe how excited I get for hardware stores these days. I think there's three very exciting parts of home improvement: planning, shopping and when the project is done and you can see the fruits of your labor. Everything in between is a pain in the ass.
So Ace Hardware has 60 shades of white. I'm all for having lots of choices, but some things these days have been taken too far. Take for instance, one brand of paint having 60 shades of white. Or an entire aisle in a store dedicated to toothpaste alone. Who really needs this many choices? I picked out 5 to take home with me to stare at for the next couple of weeks before I make a decision. The white is for the exterior trim and shutters on my house. Yep, I'm approaching the exterior paint project for my house. I've decided to just take it piece by piece so it isn't such a big job. I've got to wash down the house, sand down trouble spots, fix any rotted or damaged wood, prime the house, then paint it. It's a big job. And being that it's only getting hotter outside (while I write this), I may only accomplish washing down my house today.
I've picked the yellow for the main color, it's called Straw, from Ace Hardware. I was looking at ceiling colors for the front porch and came across something interesting. In the south, people painted the ceiling of their porch blue to ward off evil spirits (called haints). Some people paint the ceiling of their porch blue to discourage bugs. In the victorian era, people painted it blue presumably to always have a blue sky overhead regardless of how gloomy a day it was. Anyway, I've decided to go with blue, but I've got a handful of colors to choose from, so I'll paint a piece of wood with a color sample I got today and hold it next to my sample of Straw and see what I think. If I don't like that, I've got some paint chips to work with as well.
I've also decided to redo the front deck. I did it when it was too hot and it didn't turn out great, so I'm going to do it again. I'll do all the prep work (washing and sanding) while it's hot, so that when it cools down I can stain it.
I bought paint for my bedroom but won't get to that today. I'm painting the ceiling Off-White and the walls Old Basque Brown. The blue I painted it when I moved in seems too childish to me. I'm not loving it.
I have a wood pellet insert being installed in my fireplace in a week, so I had to buy wood pellets. I bought a pallet of them which will be delivered on Tuesday to my wood shed. It's a ton of wood pelllets. I mean literally, it is 1 US Ton of wood pellets. Thats 50 forty pound bags. On a pallet. I peeked at my wood shed and have decided wood needs to be moved around to make room for it. It's a little more than a cord of wood, it's infested with spiders...and it's only getting hotter outside.
I also need to weed-eat at least enough that the delivery guy can find my woodshed.
Well, enough procrastinating. By the way, if I hadn't stood in the paint aisle of Ace staring at chips for an hour, it would be 5 degrees cooler outside. Now it's nearly noon and the only thing I've accomplished is shopping....and watering my dead lawn.
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