time waste

Life. Life is beautiful. Life is an awesome responsibility. We are given such a finite amount of time to experience what can only be experienced as a human with human thoughts and emotions. We are given such freedom and such beauty to behold. And this self awareness, this knowledge is such a burden. It is so terrifying. How are we to fill our time? What are we to do with ourselves? How do we make this one life, these few moments which are our existence matter? Please, someone just tell us what to do! We are so connected and yet so alone in the universe. Just give me a distraction from my insignificance, from my inevitable demise, so I can ignore the howling void of eternity and nothingness that surrounds me!

Are you suffering from this human affliction also? Well, just buy a house. It will eat up most of your weekends so you won't have time to sit around thinking and having existential crises.

This weekend I painted a side of the house. That's right, just one side. It's an unpleasant and labor intensive job, so every year for the past three years I've painted one side of the house in the fall. It was three years ago that I noticed that the paint around certain areas of the house was peeling badly, so I had a house-painter stop buy to give me a quote to do the job. He said it would be five thousand dollars. I thanked him for his time and told him I'd think about it. After he drove away I laughed and laughed and laughed. $5,000. If a mechanic or plumber quoted me $5,000 I would probably meekly nod my head and sign a check. But to have my house painted? No. My car wasn't going to blow or up my house wasn't going to flood if I did it wrong. The worst that was going to happen was that my house's paint job would look wrecktastic. And it already did, so what was holding me back?

I bought an extension ladder and some paint supplies a few months later and got to it. My father had warned me about buying a house with wood siding. And in defense of myself and houses with wood siding, I don't think repainting a side of a house every year is that big of a burden. In general. In my case, the guy who renovated the house reused old, old, old wood boards in certain areas.  In order to make them match the smooth new wood boards, he just iced a quarter inch layer of spackle on top of them and painted it. Apparently this is a bad idea. I'm sure spackle has its uses, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. I can tell exactly which boards are the old spackle laden ones, because they are the ones with paint peeling off of them terribly.

Ideally, these old boards should be replaced, but I don't have the money for that. So, I just hack away as much of the spackle as I can, smooth it out, and repaint it. I have a dream of re-siding the house with the no-rot fake wood that some of the neighbors have. What am I doing to obtain this dream? Absolutely nothing. That kind of job will cost about $15,000 so I should be saving up some money starting three years ago.

Anyway, the side of the house I did this weekend wasn't that hard since it was the side of the house with the carport attached to it. In order to reach the tallest part of the house, all I had to do was climb onto the carport roof. I do have that extension ladder, but I also have a fear of heights, so I try to stay off of it as much as possible.

Here's an example of what I was dealing with.

And here's a section after a lot of mind numbing scraping.

At this point I sand the boards to make them a bit less bumpy and caulk and prime. Spackle is not invited. I probably should have included an after photo...