Time For a Change

Our neighbor is a great guy. He's always ready with a friendly wave and more in-depth conversations a few times each year but he's never nosy or noisy. He's almost always outdoors, planting mums, patching bare spots in his lawn, repairing downspouts, and sometimes even brushing sand out of the cracks in his patio pavers. His last name is Potter and we've started saying "we're Pottering today" if we are doing low-key maintenance tasks around the house. 

His summer project has been to take down the wooden shutters on his house, prime and paint them by hand, and put them back up. He has 18 pairs of shutters so this is a project that has taken him much of the summer. John has observed all of this and decided he needed to paint our shutters. 

When we bought the house the shutters were dark green, which I quite liked. 

Somewhere along the line (probably 15 years ago or so), John decided that they would look better painted red, so that's what he did. 

Our shutters are metal, just decorative, and there are only nine pairs of them plus some lower window trim that will need to be painted, but it's not nearly as big a project as our neighbor's. John started on Wednesday, swore at the sprayer when it clogged after 10 seconds, and bought a fancy new one, so now he has to finish the job. Guess what color our shutters are now? 

They're Ford Blue, and they're quite bright. He did buy tractor paint, so I'm glad he didn't choose New John Deere Yellow or Kubota Orange.

John asked what I thought (I wasn't consulted before this project got started) and I asked him if it mattered. (I know it doesn't now that there are eight shutters painted.) I don't think it will look nearly as nice with my usual Christmas decor of wrapping the columns like peppermint sticks, but I didn't have to do anything*, so that sort of works for me. With his attention to detail, John has also painted the hardware. 

I'll post a few photos when all the shutters are painted, put back on the house, and the window trim is painted. I do hope all that gets done before it gets too cold (and before I have to help paint). 

Wishing you all a good weekend! We're supposed to get rain from tropical storm Ian (which we still really need) so I don't think there will be much painting going on here.

* ETA: I did have to do something! Thursday afternoon John decided to take down the second-story shutters to paint them, and they were a bit more difficult. I had to help carry the terribly heavy wooden 40-foot extension ladder up from the barn and then hold the bottom while John climbed up to unscrew the shutters. Then I had to go halfway up the ladder to bring down the shutters as he handed them to me. It's a wonder neither of us was injured, but we do still have to put the shutters back up after they are painted. I am not looking forward to that!