pic of the day

apt building in san francisco hist district

exterior painting articles

I put together some articles that helped me form my own opinions and assumptions about how to deal with exterior paint. Hope it helps.

Why is my paint peeling?

Best Tips for painting exteriors

Painting brick houses

revenge of the dining room windows

Wow has it really taken me this long to get back to work on these? I've had a few days off and figured my windows aren't going to fix themselves, so I got back to work. The windows are in worse shape than they initially appeared. Whoever painted these last decided to forgo the proper repair. The old paint was scraped down, but the wood was is in pretty beat up shape. There was no oil based primer put down either, which probably didn't help. Allright people -- if you're going to repaint your original windows don't forget to put some oil based primer down BEFORE putting on the latex paint. Rant over.

This was made more difficult than it had to be since now I have to scrape off as much of the latex that I can to get down to bare wood. The wood is pretty soft and punky in spots with some serious gouges and rot holes. I'm going to have to break out my de-rot stuff and fill with plenty of epoxy to take care of this thing.

backyard before & after

I was browsing through my old appraisal from when we bought the house 3 years ago and I was shocked how much it looked like crap back here. I didn't think we'd done much, but wow that's a big difference. I think we were so blinded by the cool old house thing we didn't notice just how ugly it used to look. Hopefully in another year it'll look even nicer once we finish the last few things we want to fix on the exterior.

Many thanks to the landscaping crew from Super Handy Men -- I'm very pleased with their work.

BEFORE:

AFTER: