Painted House

Yesterday the painting of the outside of our house was completed, or pretty much completed. All that is left is picking up the ladders and paint buckets, cleaning a few spots off the deck and the windows, painting the posts and support beams under the deck, and tidying up the places where the grey and the green meet. Those same shades of grey and green can still be found on the backs of my fingers, my forearms, and the old shirt that I just threw in the garbage, thankful that the job is over, but the house is done.

I had considerable help in getting it done from Josh, a young university student from Australia, and his friend Claire, also a student and someone we have known for almost twenty years. It was a pleasant enough task, because of an unusually fine stretch of painting weather (interrupted only on a couple of weekends by tropical storms Bill and Danny) and because of our shared satisfaction in how well the house was shaping up.

Lorraine and I painted our house twelve years ago during the summer of 1997, just as we had painted other people’s houses in our first summers in Nova Scotia almost forty years ago. Actually “painted” is not quite the right word since we used an opaque stain called Sadolin Pinotex, a Scandinavian finish that has lasted very well, even though the southeast side of the house gets more than its share of severe weather. This year we have stained the house again, using new colours of Pinotex, and we hope that it will last at least as long as the previous coat. It certainly has a good chance of doing so because of the care with which we prepared the surface – Josh spent many hours on the ladder with a sander in his hands – and our careful determination to apply at least two sturdy coats of stain everywhere.

There is a satisfaction that comes from house painting, things like getting the staging and ladders into the most advantageous and stable position, getting the right amount of stain on the brush to make an even coat or line, working your way across or down a stretch of wall or trim, moving your operation as the sun moves around the house so that you aren’t painting too warm a surface, watching the constant activity in the harbour reflected in the window, and, of course, closing in on the final bits to have the job complete.

Now it is done and the house looks great. The staging can go back to Steeplejacks, the ladders hung up, and the brushes and buckets put away until touchup time. Now it’s time to move on with the work around our house, like wood to put in the shed, a walkway to be finished, mowing the lawn at least once more, and stopping on occasion to admire our house with its new coat of grey and green.