What I did last summer.....

So I've been back from vacation for a couple of days, and have had a number of friends and collegues ask me what it was I did over the summer.


I painted.


I painted three sides of a two story cabin, the walls twice and most of the window sills 4 times.


I've come back with one arm looking like it belongs to someone who trains seriously, 5 times a week, and the other arm looking like... well... an arm of a 37 year old who does not train as much as she should.




This side of the cabin had not been painted in many years, and is the side that faces the sea. When I was painting the walls, you could almost hear the wood sucking in the paint.


As one can see, these two windows are all foggy. This is because when my husband took over the cabin and it was falling in on itself, he needed many windows at the lowest prices just to fill in the holes. He was able to purchase a bunch of punctured windows for next to nothing. We have since been replacing the windows, one every couple of years. We hope to replace these in another 3-4 years.

We will have to hurry though. As you can see on the green, unpainted window frame, the wood is falling apart and rotting. When I was scraping the window that was white, I almost took out the entire bottom part of the frame with one little flick of the scraper. I gently pushed it back and asked it nicely to behave for just a couple more years.

This is our front door, saved from a security firm. We've been meaning to paint it and this year I got around to doing it.

First coat with white paint.

Second or third coat with white paint. I forgot to take pictures consistently.

Fourth coat with white paint.

All the windows and crosses in the windows were painted four times. I actually don't know what the word is for those crosses in the windows, as we never had them in my part of Canada where I grew up. In any case, they too needed to be painted 4 times, in super thin coats.

Luckily these crosses are easy to take off. You just need to put your fingers underneath them in the proper spot, apply a little upward pressure, and pop they're off!

Here's the first batch, with rocks and pieces of wood underneath them to keep them from sticking to the plastic.

Oh yeah, I also scarped and painted the kitchen door twice.

Now we're starting to see pictures of the finished job.

A long stretch of wall that's got two coats. There's a glimps of the scaffolding my husband made for me to paint the upper reaches because I didn't want to stand on a ladder. Considering he learned a few things from his father who is a Master Carpenter, I completely trust his constructions.

This is a picture of the same side of the cabin as the first pictures in this post. Everything looks so much better with some good coats of paint. Although I will have to paint the nearest window white again. I was desprately trying to get this wall painted before it started raining and sacrificed the white windows to get it done. But at least I know I'll have something to keep me busy the next time I make a trip to our little paradise.

I'm pretty proud that I got all this work done. Don't forget I did it while making most of the meals (my husband was helping his father on other construction work), keeping order inside the cabin and washing clothes by hand once a week.

Even my mother-in-law is impressed. :)