What Colour Shall We Paint the House?

The painters came out today and put on three little swatches of colour samples, so we could choose a paint colour. I have to admit that I'm not excited by any of them, especially the sort of aqua one (which doesn't look anything like the swatch but does look like the old colour).

It's been a few days since we last updated, and here's what's been going on: The painters come and caulk around the bits of wood on the house, every day, with a trail of caulk tubes following them around the house. The work they leave behind is very good; they've been doing a really careful job of the caulking, as you can see on this detail of the dining room bay.

In addition, the carpenter has been here, making repairs to the porch roof. You can't actually see what he's been doing without a ladder and some determination, so no photos. But he also attached a bunch of the trim that came loose during scraping, so now the porch columns look right again:

I also thought he said he did something else with the fascia boards, but I didn't see any progress on that mess, so maybe I misunderstood.

Over the weekend, Noel took down the DirecTV dish (we went to cable for a variety of reasons) and about half the rickety gate. We want to ask our neighbor on the driveway side about our proposed location for the new gate, but she's going to be sailing around the world for the rest of the winter, it seems (she's a navigator on a big cargo ship). Anyway. We knew we'd be taking the gate down eventually, so we wanted to do it before they finished painting. Also, the painters broke the latch by forcing it, so it was a mess to get in and out. For now we've leaned the gate up against itself to keep the dog in.

I spent some time digging out the built-up soil around the side of the house, much of which is heavily contaminated with lead chips. I'm going to talk to our neighbor on the other side about planting the alley between the houses up with mustard (which is a lead-fixer) to clear some of it out.

I stopped digging because my shovel was coming away with loads of brick chunks. Until I can determine whether or not I was digging away the actual foundation (I suspect it was some rudimentary drainage material), I'll leave off removing the one thing that may be holding that side of the house up.

posted by ayse on 02/12/04