I'm exlrrp and I approved this message.
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Ok folks, it was a big year around the the Lazy J.
I wound up getting a friend/relative from Chile to come help me for 5 weeks. This worked REAL well, he was an excellent helper: a good painter, hardworking, careful, learns quickly. Boy was this worth doing. Its HARD to get a good helper, one that keeps working while I go out and chase materials.
I do all the journeyman stuff, what I really need is a helper to hold up the other end of the board and clean up. Whoa James you're saying, what about mrs exlrrp? To which I can only ROTFLMAO. mrs e has good points but standing on a ladder isn't one of them.
Besides, it would keep her from her most important life's work, which is Head of the Complaint Department.
So anyway the scene opens as the agile old exlrrp girds himself for another battle with his house with his trusty Sancho Panza at his side.
I mean we worked. We started by prepping and painting the highest point of the house, the clerestory wall. This is the 3 story. This was one of the things I ALWAYS wondered how I was going to do---I had visions of buying a boom/bucket truck or something---it looked like it would take a sky hook.
So I went out and bought a bunch of long boards. These I used to build the scaffold. One thing I can do well is build scaffold. This shows the clerestory before painting---its the highest point on the house, that high wall with 5 windows.
here's Nico. on the finished scaffold. This took a lot of scraping, sanding and prepping. We worked a week, just on this. That barge rafter---the big 2x 12 Nico has his hand on---was so shitty looking we replaced it. it was 35', which meant 3-12' 2x12s prepped and painted before placement. They were resawn so I had to powerplane them smooth.
OK, here's what it looks like now. I'm going back and putting window trim on the 5 windows on top, like the ones on the side are getting. I decided to do it after we'd finished here. Just an upper and lower piece---getting it on the side with that lapped siding was too hard.
OK, that was the south side, now the next thing we did was paint that high wall on the east side---to the right of the clerestory in this picture.
we had to take down the old scaffold and build a new one on that side. We reused the lumber on the scaffold. this is how it looks like now:
OK, then we jumped to the other side---the west side. We took down the scaffold and rebulit it AGAIN. Did the same thing---prepped and painted the high part first, then started working our way down.
This was more problematic. I decided to take out that little popout you see in the lower right corner above. This was built to cover a major fuckup, which I discovered. This is a corner where 3 different small houses were trainwrecked together to make one house (a fourth is trainwrecked into the other side) and the surfaces didn't quite match here in this corner. So they built that little popout to cover that up. Unfortunately this was right on top of the water supply pipe that comes into the house and its the coldest corner of the house---never gets sun---and the pipes freeze up there. like everything else in this house, it was shittily built and had no insulation---it would get cold in here. This bathroom will now be more user-friendly
Here below it's being demolished. it had 5 layers of plywood on the floor---had to cut it into pieces with a Sawzall to get it out.
Ok, here's what it looks like now. the black patches are where Hardiplank siding is still to be put. When I bought this house there was 5 different kinds of siding on it---when I'm done there will be 2 kinds, almost exactly alike. The lower windows on the corner closest to us will be replaced with dual panes and a door---then I can finish the siding there. I had Nico paint it anyway to get rid of that awful orange (retch)
I'm going to put in a drop ceiling in the new remodeled bath. I gotta find a use for all that scaffold wood.
So now the only orange walls left are the two you see in the picture below. these are the kitchen walls and will be having new windows put in them, plus a new kitchen. That's a project for next year and I'm getting Nico back to help then too.
I am SO happy about how this turned out, I HATED that orange. I love it when a plan comes together in the end.
So what are you working on. Ciao, all, whatever you're doing have fun with it.