The guys were here again yesterday. I don’t know what it is with contractors. If they’d just come along every day, and put in a good seven or eight hours, they actually would have finished painting our house in the two weeks they said it would take. But no. But far be it from me to look a gift horse in the mouth. Like I said, there were here yesterday, and they made some good progress. They have apparently finished painting all the walls upstairs, because they took the paper off the windows on that floor! Yippee! I don’t have any photos of the upstairs windows papered (too depressing), but since the paper’s now down upstairs, I don’t feel so closed in by it in my office. So, here’s a photo of the view I’ve had from my desk for the last three weeks.

Since the paper’s off the upstairs windows, it’s now possible not only to see outside again, but also to go out on the deck. Yippee! Our agreement with the contractors said that they weren’t going to paint this larger deck. Several boards needed replacing, and overall the wood was just in horrible condition, so we didn’t want them to bother. Last week the subcontractor, Julio, talked to Dave about it. Julio said, yeah, sure, they could leave it undone, and Dave could paint it up when he’d done the repair work, but it wouldn’t last as long, wouldn’t be as good a painting job. No doubt. Julio also said that for a couple hundred dollars extra (cash) he’d have his guys replace all the boards that needed it and paint the deck. Well, gee. Okay. So, yesterday they pulled out three deck boards and put brand new ones in, pulled the siding off the one side (the other side is glass) and replaced that with new wood, and replaced the top railing all the way around. El spiffo!

Here’s another view of the same deck. You can see all three new deck boards, as well as the side of the house. We’d originally thought that the house color was going to be a slightly darker shade of gray, but we decided that we like this color. It’s light enough to reflect a lot of sun (important), while still being considerably darker than the off-white that we started with. The deck and what trim there is will be a darker gray when they’re done.