Chapter 2:The Pumpkin Changes to a Carriage

Now that the plumbing is signed off, Ed took the last steps to hook the sewer lines to the live septic system. Once that was done he shoveled all that dirt back into the trench. And take it from me...well actually from Ed since he did the work... when it rains hard for two days, that dirt is really heavy!

He had so much fun shoveling all that dirt he went right down to the pasture and started digging out rootballs for cucumber vines. For those of you not familiar, cucumber vines are Washington's version of kudzu vine. They have rootballs as big as a Gold's Gym Exercise ball. He dug some of them with the backhoe on the tractor, but some of them were in inaccessible areas, so he dug them up with a shovel. Needless to say, at the end of the day his back was pretty sore. I volunteered to walk on his back, but he declined saying that probably wouldn't be a good idea. Whatever could he mean!?

In the meantime, I was having fun pretending to be the Fairy Godmother, trying to turn the Cinderella garage doors into carriage doors.

I bought Valspar Ultra Premium exterior paint. It's thick, high quality paint with very good coverage. I chose Pale Cordovan for the base coat, and Natural Cork for the contrast (rails and stiles). I also got a quart of black to mix in with the tint and glaze for the wood grain definition, and for detail painting later. First I painted the base coat. We wanted it to look like cedar. After the base coat dried, I mixed 1 qt glaze with 2 oz of the Pale Cordovan, 2 oz of the Natural Cork, and a splash of black . I rolled that mixture over the base coat, in 3' sections, and wiped it with a damp rag. Once that was dry, the pumpkin effect was toned down a little, and there was a little definition to the grain.

Sunday after church, I got my grid and my pencil and started drawing the design. Once I had all three doors drawn out I spent the last hour putting tape on the first door so that Monday I could get up bright and early and start painting. I was stoked!

I got up Monday, went out to start painting, and almost every single piece of tape had come right off and was in a heap at the foot of the garage door. Between the rough surface of the door and the humidity, the tape had just floated to the ground. That turned out to be a good thing because had I tried to roll the paint with the rough surface, the paint would have bled under the tape and been a horrible mess. I just got out a brush and followed my little pencil lines, and painted the first coat of contrast. I was pretty happy with how the first coat came out...a little light on the color, but I was thinking that when I put the glaze coat over it, it would be fine. So I did all three doors, and went to bed dreaming of an equally charming Tuesday.

The next morning, I got up, did some household chores, and went out to paint. I mixed one qt of glaze and 1 cup of black, the recommended ratio, and began to paint. For the glaze, you paint on a small section, say 3', and texture, in this case, wipe with a slightly damp rag. Well the darned stuff was really really black. So I wiped some off, and then wiped some more off. I finally got it to where it didn't look like an old tire, and went to the next section. By the time I had half of one door done, Ed and I agreed this was not what we wanted. Now what? Do I just put on another coat of the contrast coat? Do I drive two hours to go get a different color? Do I fiddle with the paint I have to see if I can make it work? Yeah! Let's try that! There was about 3/4 of the gallon of the contrast color, Natural Cork left. I stirred in about 1 c. of the black, and started to re-paint. Well, that worked out just fine! So I went ahead and painted all three doors with that mixture, and we're pretty happy with the result. As you can see, the sun came out to bless the doors, which is pretty amazing since we have had over three inches of rain in the last four days. Rains here all the time.