As I said, BLUE

The porch is finally all one color. But before I show it to you, let's look at what it looked like at the end of May, shall we?

What little paint was left on the porch was a sickly shade of pale gray. Notice the chewed-up boards on the left - they had to be replaced.
The steps were mostly stripped bare. This made scraping and sanding a little easier.

And now, after WAAAAAY too much time, and many* paint sessions spread out over three months, interrupted by torrential rains and scorching heat, I give you...
Porch, September 17, 2006

...the first coat of paint. Now I need one more dry weekend to apply the next coat. (Note the blue 1996 Totota Tercel with more than 264,000 miles in the bottom left of the picture. Also note the neatly trimmed tree lawn and the shiny silver spikes on the rust-and-black wrought-iron fence.)

I complained to a friend last week how the fresh paint really makes the other problems with the porch (which will probably need to be replaced next year, or the year after that) much more apparent. The rotting boards, the rusting railings, the issues with load-bearing structures, the ugly and damaged mismatched storm doors. The more I do, I said, the more I find I have to do.

"That's the definition of home ownership," he replied.

*This originally said "half a dozen", but it was more than that. Sideboards = 2 sessions, frontboards and steps (not counting top toeboard) = 2 sessions, top toeboard = 2 sessions (scraping only!), porch floor and paint top toeboard = 3 sessions. I may have missed one or two days.