Well, gentle reader, I have done it, and I want a cookie.
I mentioned in the beginning of July that I was painting my fence this year, albeit slowly, as part of cleaning my garage.
In past years, I have started with, what, fifteen or twenty gallons of paint in the orbit of my close-in back yard, but I’ve generally turned fence painting into a multi-year endeavor. I’d start out with the outside of the whole fence, and that would end up taking a couple or three weekends of painting four or five hours each day, and by that time, I would decide I was done painting for the year. Then, the next summer, I would tackle the inner part of the fence. I’ve only painted the fence inside the pool deck once, in the cycle that started in 2020. And this does not count the time it would take to paint our rather large deck which also tends to be on a multi-year cycle. Judging by the color, I painted the deck portion during the 2020 cycle, and it must have been in the spring, as I also painted the vertical surfaces that border my beautiful wife’s flower garden, probably before it had grown. But I must have turned to the outside of the fence at that time, as only that part of the outside of the deck is Mission Brown, the 2020 color. The remainder of the exterior of the deck is Russet Brown, the 2016 or 2012 color.
This year, instead of spending four hours on each weekend day, I instead spent an hour or two (or three) most days so far this summer to march around the fence lines.
I did about three sections (that is, three segments between posts) per day. In the mornings, I’d spend thirty minutes washing and scrubbing the pickets and posts, and then I’d spend an hour or more in the afternoons painting that segment. Some of the interior parts of the fences required a lot of scraping before the painting, which slowed me down some. And the pool deck required taping down some paper to minimize paint splatter on the pool deck, so that portion required about two hours an afternoon. But, as of Saturday, I completed the project. For the first time in Nogglestead history (history beginning with the naming of Nogglestead), the fence has been painted all in the same year.
Not to say it’s the same color; it was only the same color, briefly, in the first two years of our possession. After that time, we replaced the fence around the pool, so it was bare wood until I got to it some years later.
Instead, our fence is three colors. Instead of buying new paint for this endeavor, I used paint left over from previous years instead of spending hundreds again for even more brown paint. So our tri-color fence is as follows:
- The exterior of the fence is Mission Brown, 2020’s color.
- The non-pool interior of the fence is Mission Brown mixed with Russet Brown, the previous color. It’s still darker than the previous color and mostly went over Mission Brown, but the paint is very opaque and that should not matter.
- The interior of the pool deck is Mission Brown + Russet, but with a higher ratio of Russet.
And the good news is that I have cleared out three five-gallon buckets of Mission Brown from the garage. But that, and a couple buckets of pool chemicals, leaves me with a glut of empty buckets.
I could give that walrus several buckets. Did you understand that? You’re an old man of the Internet then; the whole I can haz cheezburger/I haz bucket thing is almost 20 years old.
But, seriously, these are nice buckets. Solid walls, metal handles…. I can’t just throw them away or recycle them. They’re manufactured goods, and heirloom quality. Everyday objects, but not disposable.
I mean, all-plastic cat litter buckets–those I can recycle. But all these others?
I will throw them in the shed, I suppose.
Because cleaning the shed? That’s not on the docket for a couple of years.
