Right now my husband and I are up to our proverbial ears in home improvement chores. We don’t know which projects should take precedence which means that we have started a lot of projects. We have started a lot of projects like we are business executives. We have finished almost none. We knew that we were going to have a lot of home improvement projects when we first looked at the home. It is quite small and the previous two owners did not care for charming little house.

When we first moved in, I felt like I was at camp. I thought that we were in over our heads, but with a few ideas we came across on the many home improvement shows on television, we soon found ourselves quite comfortable. Being comfortable is not always a good thing. We were constantly working on the home during the first three months, but things have begun to taper off during the winter months. I am amazed by all the projects we did finish. 

We had to paint the house. This was the first major home improvement project on our task. The house was a corpse-blue hue and it was literally crawling off of the wooden structure. Fortunately, we moved into our new home in August, so the weather was fine for painting. The major obstacle to the do-it-yourself project was that the house was originally painted with an oil-based paint. Then it was painted with vinyl paint, and again with another oil-based paint.  

The home improvement experts at our local hardware store suggested that we either have a professional blast the horrifically deteriorating paint off of the house or we scrape the peeling paint off and use an oil-based paint to cover it. We chose the latter for our painting feat. I was just glad that we chose a small home. We scraped and painted around our work schedules and our baby’s schedule. Somehow, we completed the project.  

I am a little disappointed in our first home improvement task. We did manage to scrape the old, flaking paint off of the home. We counted five colors ranging from the corpse-blue to fluorescent green to bright red on the flakes of paint. This was an extremely painstaking task that I would not wish on my worst enemy. Once we finished that, we found the actual painting to be quite pleasant. Oil-based paint is very easy to work with.  

Oil-based paint is not easy to find. Here is where my disappointment lies: we had an extremely limited number of color choices because no one really uses oil-based paint anymore. We originally had a peeling, corpse-blue house. Now we have a neat, clean corpse-gray house. I wanted a pale yellow house. The next home improvement project will have nothing to do with painting the exterior of the house, but one day we will look into siding in shades of yellow for our charming little home.