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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..

The Painted Lady

We almost lost her in 1993.  That August our cousin Emma died at 102, and my dad was offered 10K by a buyer who wanted take the bulldozer to her gables and columns and use the corner lot for a gas station.  Matt--fascinated by architecture in general,  spearheaded an effort to hang on to the Emma House and turn her into a family gathering place.  Dad relented, and now, almost 20 years later, we can say (with some chagrin) that Phil and I (with support from spouses and kids) have kept it together--  gathering here each summer for a ritual of visiting, wiring, peeling paper, painting,  and plastering. We've known for a couple of years that the lady was overdue for a painting, and this summer we decided to bite the bullet.

EHs 1907

Ken primes the front corner...where the old porch was

Originally The Emma House had a long porch running from the kitchen door out to the front of the house. The earliest colors are a big question mark...looks like the columns were white and the body of the house a medium hue. There's quite a bit of mustard and gray in our paint scrapings.  Beyond that the fascia and drip boards emerge as a darker color still. But within my memory the house has always been white.

So this time around we plan to add some drama and--in a moderate way--return to the look of the original structure.  We'll use a rich cream on the body of the house, lighter cream on the crosspieces and window facings, and a cedar blue-green and deep navy as accent colors.  If it looks ok we may throw in a little coppery russet color as another small accent.

Our painter,  Ken Jewell (no relation, as far as we know), is down with the color scheme.  Besides being a teacher, minister, deep thinker and good talker,  he's a dedicated runner,  in great physical shape (a requirement for this project),...and just crazy enough to be inspired by a job on this scale.

Robert Lee Johnson, Emma's father   1907

Clinton is in the midst of a "paint up" campaign, and everybody who's cruised by (that would be the whole town, population 1600)  is interested in the end result. Ken and I have made a pact that we'll be undaunted by any negative opinions.

The Emma House has a life and history of her own, continually colored with revisions and amendments, and this summer's changes will be a continuation of that.  She's always been a work in progress.

Father's Day 2012

On this day I can clearly see my Dad reading his Time Magazine and morning Courier Journal, encouraging us to see the big picture,  insisting that we not rush to judgement.  He knew how to save a situation by diffusing tension with humor...what a gift.  When we walk at Threeponds I feel his essence there, recalling the vast and ancient history of the place and reminding us that no one ever really owns the earth.

  Perspectives

Perspectives   water color and tempe

Threeponds
has possibilities. Take the lowdown
and you have the ironstone color
of water. Then crouch,
if you would, beside some cypress knees. Listen to
the crows; hear a myth

bubbling up in the shape of
buffalo tracks.

From another vista
an unlikely blue, hard match
for a cold sky.  Periwinkle
spilling
down the bank,
a clear perpendicular
blasted
by outcroppings. Get a grip.

Touch
the sandstone and then move on.

Stand at the top. You’re
in any woods until you hear the
vibration. The source? A
little pregnancy of earth, the mound.
Can you dig it? Who
cares. Just birdpoints and potshards, so what’s
the electricity? Dad's look
the light, the orange and magenta warning, mouthing

don’t touch, don’t touch.

Paint, Ponds, Pandemonium

This old girl is about to get some color.

 Such Madness!

Goodbye russet.  Hello navy.

Since leaving San Francisco on May 1 we've been in the blender!  First week we opened the Emma House for this year's long stay (May till December) and set about a dozen projects in motion:  repainting the dining room, a new garden plot, wrestling crabgrass out of the retaining wall garden, and...the biggie...preliminary plans for repainting the divine Miss Emma...quite a huge endeavor that involves a whole team of shrub-cutters, wood-repairers, and of course the painter.

We got a real bed for the sleeping porch upstairs and the most amazing part of the stay so far has been our nights under the stars.  Since the July humidity hasn't set in yet we can go to sleep watching the stars and wake up with the birds.  It's like living in a treehouse.

The "revised" sleeping porch.

We've been to Lexington twice to work on my rental house there.  Ryan and Holly needed a larger place and I was sorry to say goodbye to them, but Bethany is lined up for mid-July...all good.

This transition has pushed us (Kent and me) to do some major renovations on the house.  You're already heard too many puns (thanks, Kent and Matt) about my mucking out the pond on Mucker's Day and I won't go there again.

But this week Kent and I hit it hard, doing gutter and plaster work and replacing a large part of the aging deck.

Installing two new light fixtures was a bit of a challenge  with the old knob-and-spool and we got some professional help there. Turned out our chosen electrician also works for KU.  He does quite a bit of work in the hood and gave us a thumbs-up on the overall wiring...which felt good.

Liz's pond Lex

Ira's pond near Scottsville

Ira gave me some barley straw to put in the fishpond (he's in Allen County trying to clear up his own pond and getting ready to cut timber!) and between that and some chemical action the water in the little Lexington pond at least is reasonably clear.

I can follow Caliban as he glides around....he's about five inches long now.  I added three more dime store goldfish and so far they're surviving...giving sidelong glances to Caliban and definitely keeping their distance.

Tomorrow the floor refinishers arrive at the Richmond Ave house in the early am, and Ira and I will meet back in Clinton tomorrow night...a five hour drive for me and about three for him.  We'll celebrate Father's Day sans sons but it will be fun-- pizza at the Emma House with friends-- and (God willing) the painter will start scraping the house on Monday morning.  As you can see, this post doesn't resemble anything literate, creative, or witty....no time for refinement (in writing, speech, or attire) this week!