It's Amazing What a Coat of Paint Can Do

Sometimes it seems that Carlos and I can not agree on anything.  He prefers coffee, I prefer tea.  He wants to watch a movie, I want to read a book.  He's a PC, I'm a mac.

Anyway, as I mentioned before, on his parents property there is a little playhouse that we thought would be a nice background for wedding photos once it was cleaned up.  Here it is before...

And after...

Eat your heart out Mondrian.

The final product is a result of a month of weekend work and hours of, um, discussions.

We went to the paint shop thinking it would be easy to pick a color.  Wrong.  At first we thought a light yellow, but then decided it would just look like a miniature version of the main house.  Carlos suggested peach, but I vetoed that since I thought it would clash with the red and yellow details of our wedding.  Green was out, because it would blend in too much to the grass.  No blue, because it would blend in with the sky.  No brown, said I.  No pink, said he.  No bright colors, said both.

A sister-in-law suggested two tone, with blue and lavender separated by a wavy line.  But Carlos wasn't fond of purple and I've always preferred rectilinear shapes.  Then Carlos mentioned multi-colored squares, like in a restaurant we had visited in Quito.  At first I thought it would be a bit much, but we finally agreed on that pattern, but only if it was in coordinating colors.

So we had the design and went back to choosing colors.  We chose some, but then found out that the store didn't have them.  We chose others, but they only came in gallons rather than pints.  We chose again, but the oil based paint cost four times as much as the water based.  And finally, about an hour after we first arrived in the paint shop, we bought one blue, one green, and one white can of paint.

In hindsight we should have power washed the structure before painting, but we found a straight edge and jumped right in.  I drew the lines, then painted them white, while Carlos and one niece painted in the rectangles.  Other family members helped a bit, but the most enthusiastic were the youngest, who got more paint off the walls (and on their clothing by leaning on them) than they did on the walls.

It took about three weekends of painting to perfect the lines, clean up the drips, and make sure that everything looked good.  The following weekend, Carlos power washed the inside and some of the paint outside, um, was altered, but it still looks good.  Add a weekend to create a flower bed and path, and we now have, once again, the final product.

I mean, the final product for now.