Painting the Dollhouse

Partner and I are finally getting home improvements started. This past week we officially hired a contractor who will replace all the windows and do a small addition on the back of the house. He will also put in some French doors so we can more easily get to the deck. This last improvement is part of Partner's master plan to make the deck into a nice place where we can host guests and not be embarrassed.

Most importantly, we have also started painting the outside of the house. Up till this week it's been a dingy yellow with peeling paint. Now it's a latte color (tan) with a soft, grayish-green trim around the windows and a dark brown/purple accent. (The actual name of the accent color is black bean, and it resembles that quite well; in the can it looks like a very dark purple - exactly like the liquid in a can of black beans. Once it dries, however, it's hard to tell if it's purple or brown.) Today I did the front door all in the accent color, so it really draws the eye - which is good considering the fact that the house looks like it has leprosy. Which is to say that, although Partner did an admirable job power-washing the walls and trying to remove the peeling paint, many of the shingles still have paint that is half hanging off. Where the peelings were taken off, those shingles still look kinda shabby under the one coat of tan. Our goal is to put primer on those shingles that are half-peeled then cover them with another coat of the tan. A couple of weeks ago I would've said that was a pipe dream, but considering all the hard work we've been doing lately, I'd say it's now a possibility. (Forgot to mention: we weren't able to do the best scraping job on the shingles because that dingy yellow paint is lead-based, and we don't want to release all that lead dust into the air. Partner has been doing a great job collecting all the shavings that have come off so far.) Tomorrow and Monday are supposed to be fairly nice days, so more painting for us!

I had a "two worlds collide" kind of moment this past week at EarthShare, the company I volunteer for. One of the gals who work in the office asked me - apropos of nothing - if I were a big Wonder Woman fan because there was going to be some kind of event happening at the Excalibur comic book store. I said, "No, but I bet I know the guy who's putting it on." Sure enough, a family acquaintance (not close enough to be called a "friend," really) Andy Mangels is running the show. Isn't it weird when two different parts of your life intersect like that? And by the way, who knew there were that many WW fans in Portland? And the most important question of all: why did Joss Whedon stop writing the script for the movie?

Speaking of Joss, we were at a friend's place the other night, and he showed us the unaired series finale of Dollhouse which came in the blue-ray dvd set. It was so good, I almost wish the series had ended just so more people could've gotten to see that episode. It was a great reminder at just how wonderful TV can be.