Painting in the Sun
[Written 15 August 2013]
We very much love our house and garden, but they come with a penalty: there’s a lot of wood that needs staining, preferably ever year or every other year.
Last year we were staining some part of the wood-work pretty much throughout the summer, but this summer has been wet, wet, wet, so we were already well into July before the weather got dry enough that we could finally get some outside work done.
Now, we heard from a friend that the staining oil/paint is really quite toxic, so Finnur took it upon himself to be The Stainer (while I remained The Breastfeeder). Which meant that poor Finnur spent all the sunshine days staining all the doors and windows on the lower floor and balcony. And we totally forgot to take a single photo of him doing it!
Towards the end of the week, Finnur reminded me that we’d always meant to fix the mess we made on the house walls while staining the balcony last year, and since this job required normal house paint, I volunteered.
Come Friday, Finnur’s parents were kind enough to take the older kids with them to their summer house by Laugarvatn , giving us 24 hours of pretending to only have one kid before we followed them there. (And boy is having one kid a walk in the park easy!) 🙂
We used the opportunity to get Indian take-away (which the kids frown upon) and to paint. Yes, very exciting.
Last year, when we stained the balcony floor, we neglected to cover the walls of the house itself. As a result, the white-ish walls were covered in ugly brown streaks, which needed to be painted over.
Just documenting the type of paint we used. When I started painting I discovered that the upstairs and downstairs walls weren’t the same white-ish color! And it sort of looked like the upstairs balcony had been painted using indoor paint or something, because it was very patchy…
Thankfully we get a free daily newspaper delivered to our door every day, so we had lots of paper to cover the patio. And I learnt from painting the upstairs balcony walls to tape the darn newspaper down by the walls.
Saturday 27 July 2013
We continued painting the next day, during which the weather was absolutely GORGEOUS. I was wearing black socks and I had to keep moving into the shade because my feet were frying! I grabbed this photo of the thermostat as it set a personal record of 31C/88F when the sun filled the balcony space as much as it could. It went down a few degrees as the sun moved away.
Close to being done shortly after 2 pm. The upstairs needed two coats, but the downstairs needed three so it took a while to finish.
Just a quick reminder that there are strawberry plants in the garden. That were finally flowering!
After we finished painting and packing we headed east to Laugarvatn to hang out with Finnur’s parents for a couple of days in the idyllic countryside.
Bjarki, not thrilled at being parentless for so long.
But he cheered up! 🙂
