Getting Lazy In My Old Age

Come fall it'll be forty years since we bought this house, which was built about 1950. I assume it was professionally painted by the developer at that point, and it looked like it had a fresh coat when we bought it. Over the years I've bought new brushes and rollers, gallons of paint, and repainted it myself just like my neighbors did. A painting contractor was an expensive luxury when you had kids to raise and a wife who was a perpetual student, switching majors from languages to computer programming to accounting to medicine. The marriage didn't survive but the house did.

A few years after we bought it we decided that beige with brown trim was more "in" than the 1950's look of pale green with white trim. Since then it's just been variations of the theme, never an exact match because there's really no way to match a color that's faded more on the sunny side than on the shaded side. Preserving the "theme" made sense to me because everytime we get a hurricane flying limbs manage to chip the paint in places, and on occasion even that yucky green gets to see daylight again from its hiding place six layers down. Still, there's a limit to just how many layers of paint you can pile one atop the other.

Professional attention was once more needed to pressure clean the house, taking most of the chalky old paint off of the walls before sealing and repainting. That was a lot more than I wanted to do myself, a lot more than just rolling on another coat, and I would have had to rent the pressure cleaner and learn how to use it. There was also some rotted and termite damaged wood around the eaves in need of replacement. I'm not twenty-five anymore. Time to call in the big guns! Me? I just watched.