Night and Day

Over the past week and a half, I have been working on painting my house. The house, formerly known as the "Lime Green Leisure House" was painted a very minty green for years.

Ivy coated almost all of the north side of the house and the combination of forest green foundation and minty green house just was painful to look at.

Well, this fall - after the house next door was painted - my dad, the family's house painter, was "convinced" to help paint mine.

Step 1) I had to remove all of the ivy from the north side of the house. For years, this ivy was the source of bags and bags of decoration for the Winter Rose event for our Shire in Ashland. Even with me whacking off lots of the vines, it still grew back with vigor every spring. So this was a big step to try and kill it.

I've found that you can't really kill ivy unless you engage in chemical warfare. All you can do is destroy most of what you see and hope that you've encouraged it to grow elsewhere for a while.

So once I had all of the ivy off of the house, I had to deal with all the tendrils that clung to the wood. These things are a pain in the ass to remove even with a razor blade.

So that took me a very long time to be able to have the side of the house ready to be painted - even if only just to cover what couldn't be scraped off.

One hundred and fifty dollars in paint later, I have the front three sides of the house completed and trimmed and now my dad is adding the foundation paint to remove the last shades of green.


I'm going to have completed pictures once I get the foundation done, the hand-rail spray painted and all of that completed.