More home maintenance

[kate_schaefer]

My house is being painted, right now. Bright yellow, with red doors, sashes, and muntins, blue porches, rafters, and window trim. Yes, we have taken the color scheme of our kitchen, or of any ordinary set of blocks, and applied it to the outside of the house. To be more precise, we are paying a crew of guys to wear hazard suits and masks while they first scrape the entire surface of our house, then spray it down, then paint it with sprayers and brushes and rollers. This follows on the heels of the crew of guys who stuffed all the recesses and crevices of the walls and attic with insulation, who in turn came after the crew of guys who ripped off selected bits of siding in order to reinforce the walls and bolt them to the foundation so the house won't slide off in a moderate-to-strong earthquake. In a really strong earthquake, we're all doomed, so my plan is to be dead for a hundred years or so before that happens, but we're set for the milder ones.

We were going to have all this work done during the summer, but life intervened, as it so often does. The warm weather held for the earthquake guys, the insulation guys, the carpenter who fixed the siding after the earthquake guys and the insulation guys, the painting prep guys, and the first two days of painting. It rained the day they pressure-washed. It's supposed to rain at least some of every day from here until the end of the weather forecast. I expect it will rain on the days after that, too, because weather forecasts are extensible, unlike the Mayan Long Count Calendar*.

Eventually, there will be enough dry weather to finish painting. The portable toilet will be removed from our driveway. We'll move all the stuff out of the backyard under the porch where it belongs, and put the things we've shuffled into various spots in the basement back into the correct spots in the basement, and the things that belong on the front porch back on the front porch. We'll throw away the things we unearth in the process that we should have thrown away years ago. We'll be ready for winter. It will be late December by then, but we'll be ready.

*Obviously, I believe that the Mayans were just going to get a new stone disc for the wall when the old one ran out. We wouldn't bother painting if the world were coming to an end. And it's too late for me to convert now, anyway.

Comments

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

I read that as "bright yellow, with red dot," which is a more amusing image. Perhaps not one you'd wish to live in, though.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the quantity of toys in our house?

We considered painting each side of the house a different color, so going for big red dots wouldn't have been all that much of a stretch. A tad more whimsical than we actually are, but only a tad.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Can't remember where I saw it — maybe a letter to VIZ — but one fellow somewhere said, "It's true! I just got a new calendar and it only goes up to December, 2012!"

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've seen several variants of the joke. Makes me giggle every time.

Of course, as I contemplate filling out my ballot, I'm thinking about your old cartoon lamenting the lack of a ticky box for none of the above. I've seen many variants on that joke, too, but yours is the one that's firmly planted in my head.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

It's at my flickr. (For some reason it wasn't there, so I uploaded it again.)