A coat of paint does wonders

Hello all,

Since we had a beau­ti­ful week­end I found it per­fect to do some touch-up paint­ing. I repainted the kitchen door a pretty rasp­berry red. I then moved on to two dec­o­ra­tive plaques that will have our house num­bers tacked on them. They look so nice.

Now what should I do with the front door? She is a beau­ti­ful door, built in 1925, solid and two inches thick and rounded at the top. That is why I wanted to buy this house, just for the front door. The inside of the door is nat­ural wood that has dark­ened with age, as 86 can be a bit elderly. The front of the door is red but the paint job is just paint cov­er­ing lay­ers of chipped paint.

Four years ago I was going to strip the door and repaint but my hus­band thought the job too big and tedious. As time passed I liked the char­ac­ter of the lay­ers of paint and could over­look the thick chips. I will be hon­est and tell you the door is a mon­ster to open, she resists with every push and pull. She has two 12-inch long black wrought iron hinges on the front, a match­ing curved Vic­to­rian door han­dle and a door knocker. These things will not be able to be taken off to paint the door because they were nailed to the door with square nails.

Finally there is a tiny peek-a-boo win­dow with leaded glass. If the weather holds I will scrape down the door and give her a triple coat of the pretty rasp­berry red paint. The curved top screen door will also get a quick touch up job but the queen of doors will get time and energy spent on her so she will shine and once again be a show piece.

I will take my time with this sturdy door because the other job that needs to get done is clean­ing up the base­ment. If I take my time and paint slowly maybe Jack will have the base­ment done before I clean the paint brushes. That’s what I call pre-planning!

I absolutely hate our base­ment. Now it is not the worst base­ment I have ever seen but I just hate to go down there. When we moved into this house you had to almost get on your knees and go down the stairs back­ward so you could even get into the base­ment. As you can imag­ine the first job Jack did was fix that problem.

He had to cut back the top of the land­ing and he made it look so sim­ple I won­dered why some­one didn’t do that years ago. At one time there was a washer and dryer hook up down there and I can­not imag­ine any woman try­ing to wres­tle a laun­dry bas­ket of clothes up and down those stairs. Any­way, I hope Jack doesn’t need my help too much down in the dungeon.

I repainted the trim work in the kitchen and bed­room. Jack spray­painted all the old reg­is­ters and cold air returns. A fresh coat of paint does mir­a­cles for these old pieces. He even bought a cou­ple new reg­is­ters when paint couldn’t per­form the intended miracle.

Since I started this let­ter Jack installed the plaques on the house by the front and back doors. They look lovely. He’s a pretty good handy­man to have around. I guess when it’s time I’ll let him move back to Welling­ton with me because it seems I will always have a need for a handyman.

Good wishes to all,

Patty

Posted by Pat Sumpter on Apr 22 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.