Day 70: Painting Our House

This summer we have finally began to paint Our House. The weather this summer has been very variable, and bad weather and weekends seem to be highly correlated. Thus the progress is slow, but it's still looking good after only three days on the job.

On Day 68, the vertical columns and the horizontal beam under the roof were primed, and parts of the railing got their first coat of paint.

Almost at the end of Day 69, large parts of the western face of the house had received the first coat of red paint. Finally the final look became apparent: the classic combination of dark red paint for the walls, and white for the window frames.

The factory name of the colour scheme we chose for our house reflects just how traditional these colours are: "Mummola" ("granny's house"). The colours are Tikkurila 526X (red) and 603X (white).

Today (Day 70), we painted the lower part of the south face of the house, which turned out to be a somewhat tedious job, since there are three narrow sections with horizontal panels between windows, door, and at the corner.

We had a GoPro Hero 2 taking photos every 10 seconds during painting and made a short time-lapse film of it. The above image is a composite of the first and last images of the time-lapse sequence.

Finally, here's a photo of what it looks like now while writing this blog post. The gable as well as all wooden panels under the roof overhangs will have to wait until we have rented a cherry picker in order to work safely and efficiently.

Colouring the Future

Today nothing happened on the land, due to low temperatures (–20°C) and lack of chain saws. Instead I went through all the paper work, sorted all the gazillion technical drawings into some sensible order, and checked the finances. In Finland, the value-added tax was increased from 23% to 24% at the beginning of the year, and we were happy to learn that Muurametalot will swallow the additional per cent, i.e. the price in our contract stands. Nice touch!

In the evening we finally finished a job, which – on and off – took some three weeks: we finalised our plan on which paint to use for which wall. We decided against wallpaper, because we think one can grow tired of any design, and it's tricky to change, while painted walls can simply be painted over. Therefore, we can also be a bit more bold in the choice of colour. The photo shows all the paint samples we were looking at – a subset of twelve different tones were chosen in the end. Happy guessing, which these will be... :-)