Sunday, November 25, 2012

Surrender


Mud-slush
of May careened into
July
painting from the sky
the bank time and temp
sweated out the truth of it
one hundred eight degrees.

Six months we've lived close to the ground
porch swing creaking out a
slow heartbeat that
wanted to hang on past
coy song and
fire of autumn night

and did, through that third week
of October when we found ways
to walk on water and raised
smoke signals and dug
fingers into sand.

No denying it though
when yesterday's ginkgo
in one
relentless hour of sky and wind
made peace with passage
and yielded up the last
of her gold.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Finish, Finis, the Finial



But I was so much older then...
I'm younger than that now.
  ---Bob Dylan


It was in the 90s that we last painted the house, and I recall getting Mom's ok to do something daring...I wanted the field color to be cream, and the woodwork white. When we got to the finial, that architectural finishing touch on the highest point of the roof, I had it brought down and gave it a brush of blue.

This time around, being much younger than our former selves, we asked Tommy to scale Everest, set his sights on the finial, and go for the gold.

The Great Mystery

There's something to see on every side.
As we've ripped boards and relocated piles of dust in the attic of the Emma House we've scanned each inch for marking and numbers on the timbers--anything that would give us a clue as to the origin of the house plan itself.

Queen Anne was the style of choice at the turn of the 20th century and its greatest champion was the Knoxville architect George Franklin Barber (1854-1915) who marketed his house plans through catalogs worldwide.

Barber's drawings featured an overall sense of harmony--with wide verandas and decorative gables with contrasting trim.  His houses often had steep pitched roofs and he was determined that each side and angle of his homes was visually interesting.  Barber's early designs featured turrets and circular elements, and his later designs had columns and symmetrical features like those on our own front porch.

The back porch is still in the works.
A Barber design, Bainbridge, Ga.









Another oblique connection to Barber is that the original builders of the house--the Katzs--were an affluent and educated Jewish family from Nashville who would certainly have known that one of the premiere architects of the era was also a Tennessean.

The original plan of the Emma House is out there somewhere....in a museum, catalog, plan book, or perhaps hiding in plain view on a corner lot in some Southern city.  

Friday, July 27, 2012

Edges and ledges

See it? That new cedar green strip
above the 2nd floor porch window?
All summer my body has been cranking out an early-morning song,  a call and response with the birds. My alarm is set for 5:55,  but I'm always ready to sprint before the tone sounds. Lately, however, my brain cells need to get out and start painting at 3:30 or 4am, making me think that Simi might be right...I am a little close to the edge.

It was breezy at 5:30 am today and I was hyped on coffee and paint fumes and way too eager to paint the porch floor, having spent much of yesterday with three brushes in my hand (yes--navy, cedar, cream) trimming fine details on the columns and repairing one bobble just in time to make another and have to switch colors.  But then Tommy arrived  (taken off the other job removing asbestos after his work partner--all space suited and helmeted up--keeled over yesterday--wonder why)  making this a surprise "lift day," and thereby scratching all other plans. 
100 degrees outside, 120 degrees inside.

Ok, we are flexible around here.  I changed the game plan  and  painted from the lift while Tommy repaired gutters.  Everyone agreed that the front of the house above the ultra-elaborate pedimento was a large yawn by comparison to the extravaganza of color we had created on the porch.  So...I added a cedar stripe below the nearly invisible navy and even more invisible green brackets that I'd almost killed myself back-bending into the first week.  Yes, I know.

Someone (I believe it was La Postina, Marie) tattled to Ken that I'd painted the back gable detail green-blue-green instead of the green-green-blue that we have on the other two) so Ken repaired my mistake only to paint the same detail in another green-blue-blue.  All this prompts me to wonder how many wrong ways there are to paint a gable.  Hot, hot, hot.  I tell you we are losing it.

Green blue.  Blue green?  Green blue green??
I took myself out of the mix after lunch and left Tommy and Ken in the lift painting the back sunroom windows.  One of the things I did this morning before dawn was to stretch as far as I could out of the corner window just to see if I could reach the exterior brackets with a scraper and paintbrush.  Well, yes...if you hook your right leg around the window ledge, hang on to the roof with your left fingertips, grip the brush in your teeth, and don't look down. It gives new meaning to the word "window-seat."

After today we'll be finished painting from the lift.  Just kidding!  The gangly dinosaur is beginning to look right at home in our yard, along with Old Forester, Subaru, and Truck of Antiquity.  And Tommy has moved into the sleeping porch and is beginning to leave laundry on the floor and say things like, "How is supper shaping up?"


Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Are we having fun yet?

Actually, yes.
This column was creeping outward.
Ira dons headdress, attacks lattice.

Tommy, me, and the lift.  We stayed high all day long.
North Side.  The last frontier.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Pedimento, continued

Shot from church steps.

Pedimento


Out, out, damned spot!  Cedar must go.
My friend Barb calls her blog Pentimento, an Italian term meaning the painter repented, painted over, and left traces of the original design.  Such is the history of the front pediment of the Emma House.

The center triangle was originally gray--we think--to go with a mustard exterior.  For years it was a solid white--obviously a relief from the previous colors.  With this incarnation I can't get it right, either...the interior triangle has now been painted light cream, cedar, and finally darker cream, the field color of the house.

I've sat on the church steps and pondered the colors, and how each balances with those surrounding it.  I've mused on the play of tones as I walked to the post office, the bank, and the library.  (All just around the corner in Clinton.)  I've backed into the street during mid-day traffic (not that dangerous) and decided if the pediment center was cedar then the surrounding windows would need to be painted to balance.  Not what I want, at least not at this point.

I think this final color--the khaiki-based cream of the body of the house--is the keeper, but tracks and traces of the process remain around the edges, in the farthest corners where my brush wouldn't reach, and in little scars and pock-marks that cover the surface and challenge my will.  This house will not surrender its history.  And the floor of the pediment--where we all signed our names last Friday-- looks like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Friday, June 29, 2012

The Pizza de Resistance

Water-soaked rags on our heads...they helped.
The architectural pizza de resistance (a John Ross term) is the front porch.  On this Friday of our second week  we'd wanted to finish that--and a whole lot more.  The problem was the heat.  According to the Community Bank Time and Temp sign (which we can see from the lift) it was 108 by noon.

We kept at it as long as we could but by mid-afternoon we had to put on the brakes.  Nobody was ready to call it quits, because our principal painter--Ken-- will be away for three weeks and we'll be in slow-mo during that time.

Anyway...we had lemonade shandies on the side porch and quickly got over the heartbreak of not reaching our goal.


Pediment colors are tricky, we discovered.
K-Coog this is your side of the house.
Final pediment colors are on hold for now.
Pizza for lunch seemed thematically correct.
We all officially signed off for the holiday week.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Day Nine?




It's a form of progress when friends, sensing desperation, jump in to help.  Jim Lemons sent Tommy and the skylift on Tuesday, making time for us in his already overbooked schedule.  Cherry Pyron showed up at seven am this morning and worked with us till five in the 100 degree heat...just having knocked off a house for Habitat for Humanity.   Jim sent a second workman late this afternoon to help scrape the gable that faces Mayfield Highway.  Now I am fully understanding why my dad once had this house spray-painted all over in refrigerator white.  But yes, it has been fun.


Here's a sequence of the day's photos.



Cherry Pie takes a break from Habitat.
I don't know who is going to paint the remaining 22 under-gutter brackets (of 75) but it may not be me. 

Tommy and Liz on terra firma


Tomorrow, tomorrow, it's this side...tomorrow....

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Give me a lift, will ya?

Ken finished the cedar colored porch ceiling this morning and I added navy trim.  The rest of the day was spent on the lift with Tommy.  We painted trim, took water breaks and smoke breaks and told some jokes.   He really is a lot of fun...best of all this thing he drives eliminates the need for a ladder.

It took quite a while to get the first gable right.  I painted with Tommy most of the morning and then Ken took my place. As soon as I bailed out of the cabin and went inside there was an extreme noise and the sound of a breaking window.  Jim will pay for the window replacement, and I will have a lot of fun reminding them that as soon as I left the cockpit something disastrous happened.

shot through the upstairs window, now in a bazillion pieces
can you see the color?  it's there...
This is what a rough draft looks like, children.  Maybe it will get edited and spiced up at some point.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Streetside

It was into the 100s yesterday and by late afternoon we were looking and feeling our best.  It's the most visible side of the house, at the intersection of Highway 51 and Highway 58, so the general public can see the process.   I am expecting a massive traffic pileup any day now, just from the rubbernecking.

This morning I'm up at 5:15.  Jim Lemons is sending reinforcements at 7am, and they'll be scraping the highest areas of the house, using the lift.  Ken will finish the interior front porch and then I can start on the color trim.

A "before" pix in the early morning light.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Revising and Editing

House painting, like life, seems to require endless editing.  Compose, delete, redraft.  Take a look at the progress,  make amendments.  Decide what you can salvage, what you should go to the mat for, and when you have to settle.

At the end of this first week Ken, Ira, and I have covered all this territory in painterly fashion, and a lot more in terms of conversation and music. The Wailin' Jennys, Gillian Welch, and Allison Krauss have filled the hours.



Black screen doors--found years ago in the garage--now have a dusting of copper to soften the tone.  

Section finis?  Never completely. 









The beadboard above the navy fascia was first the same Dunmore Cream as the house body. But in the context of the northwest corner the color seemed more yellow and less the muted cream we want to achieve.

Ken rewrote that headline in about five minutes; now the whole section is the same light cream
 as the column...and the contrast works.

With paint or pen, changes can be made in a flash.


Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Ladders




Black screen doors must go.


Today's work began and ended with ladders.  Before 9 we headed to Springhill to borrow Tom and Cherry's uber-ladder.  It was way too much for us to haul back to Clinton, so we moved to Plan B which was to borrow the 24 foot Habitat ladders for a few days.

Only problem was, they're in Hickman.  So we combined the trip to Hickman with a paint run to Fulton.  We got back around noon, and discovered that the four gallons of paint I had mixed for the trim color was much darker than the first batch. That's it on the ceiling of the porch....like walking into a banana skin.  Should be the same color as the column.

Tried out a copper on the mailbox.

Sooo...back to Fulton for an "add white" trip at the end of the day.  The payoff:  painting the navy band around the lower part of the porch as the sun went down.  Never really noticed the brickwork before. 

The porch ceiling may end up being cedar, same as the porch floor will be.  And those black screen doors really do hurt my eyes.  Anyway,  I had to crawl back up with my 1-inch Purdy to and see how the cedar and navy combo worked.  At this point Ira came out and physically dragged me off the ladder.  Time to call it a day.








Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Edits

Not quite right. Will try again tomorrow.


Experimental Colors, cedar and navy
Where can the russet color go?
Cleo wonders who will replace the front step.
What color should the porch ceiling be?
Two tones of cream...wowza  This definitely does look fine..