This morning was beautiful, cooler than the past couple of days and a little breeze and by 7:30 a.m. I was ready for the crew to show up that was giving up their day to scrape, tape, and paint my house. I had a few moments to myself to take a couple of pictures of the house and remember the day Mike and I looked at my house's Open House the summer of '85. It was a Sunday afternoon and at that time you were able to park on the street on our block. I don't remember when the City decided to take away parking on the street on our block - but Mike and I were able to park under the tree that is on my parking. We arrived before the Open House started and I took one look at "that grey, icky stucco house" and didn't even want to waste my time going inside. But Mike knew better - he knew what it would look like inside with big, old woodwork trim, maybe French doors to a solarium and more - and he was right. I took two steps inside the front door, saw the French doors to the solarium to my left and saw the built-in China hutch further in the living room and knew I wanted this house. So while it's all good to get the house painted, it was a little bittersweet for me before everyone arrived.
It got hotter as the day wore on, and it was really hot on the roof working on the higher parts of the house (I say this like I know this first hand being on the roof, I wasn't on my roof) but people just kept working away. The scraping got finished whatever was leftover from a week ago Friday and the only side of the house that didn't get painted was the backside. Everything got taped and they had two sprayers going on two sides of the house to put the main color (white) down. Looks like one more Saturday and everything will be finished.
Enjoy the pictures below - and you'll see that even the kids got into scraping before they headed to Legion Park across the street to play on the playground equipment and then wade in the wading pool :)
Ok then.........I tried to load 13 pix from today with pictures 12 and 13 taking a while. They finally loaded but then I couldn't get the pix to dump into my post so I saved my post thinking I'd just go back in and edit my post because my pix would be saved right - nope - grrrrhhh. So.....I will try to post the pictures tomorrow - heavy sigh.
Butler made lots of new friends today and I had to take him outside (on his leash) a few times to do his duty. And I have no idea what all he did when people went inside to use the bathroom - I hope he was on his best behavior for them.
After everyone left and I had taken a picture from the front of the house, as I walked across the front yard to take a picture of the north side of the house, guess what I saw????? One guess. A garter snake! I could not believe it. Evidently it knew when the crowd was gone and it was safe to slither in front of the lower planter in my front yard. Dad saw two in the backyard yesterday - so I'll be calling and leaving a message on the pest people's voicemail tomorrow to let them know we've seen snakes within 60 days of their second spraying. Actually I thought I saw one in the backyard as I was mowing last night - and was like "Dad, there's a snake, get it with the hoe!" And he's looking and looking and I'm going, "it's right there, right in front of you!" Then I realized I have something in my grass that has a yellow tint to it that made me think it was the yellow stripe of a garter snake that was coiled up in my grass - nope. False alarm and it's time to replace my contact - I switch it out the first day of each month so it was kind of dirty to be looking through................
