Haint Blue?

I am mildly obsesses with this Canadian band even though they broke up in 2007.  They are called The Illuminati.  I have heard that their live shows melted your face.  Sorry I never had the chance to be melted by them.

Anyway, besides the ongoing job of always looking for new stuff to play on the radio, we have survived another hideous Texas summer and have been interviewing architects for our kitchen renovation.  Haven't been doing a whole heck of a lot around the house lately but last weekend I finally got around to painting our porch ceiling blue...something I have been wanting to do since our Spring roadtrip that took us to New Orleans and Savannah where I snapped a lot of pictures of porches with blue ceilings...like these:

I did some reading about blue porch ceilings.  The color is called "haint blue" but what the heck does that exactly mean? And whether you believe in this junk of not, here is an explanation.

Painting trim, doors, shutters, ceilings and even rooms this color was regularly done centuries ago in Africa as it was believed to ward away evil spirits (called "haints").  This paint was created using various natural pigments and lime, so shades of haint blue varied from location to location.  When millions of Africans were kidnapped from their homeland and brought to the States as slaves this tradition came with them, and today haint blue is found on loads of houses, particularly in the South.

Haint blue ranges from blue-green to blue-violet but is meant to look like water to fool "spirits" because, as the story goes, they can't cross over water. Using haint blue on doors, shutters, window trim, ceilings, the whole damn building, can confuse spirits and discourage them from "crossing" into your house.

It is believed that haint blue can fake-out insects and birds, too, because it looks like an endless sky...not a great place to make themselves at home.  The lime in the original formulas, it is said,  is what likely deterred the insects and birds, not the color itself.  Modern paint does not contain lime so I'm not convinced it will stop all those wasps from hooking up with my porch ceiling, but I do like the color and it ads a snazzy bit of interest to most exteriors.

Here are a variety of blue paint chips.  I taped them to the porch ceiling and contemplated them for a few days.  We decided on a color called "Winsome Blue" from Behr (3rd card from the left in the middle).

Here is the porch when I got started.  First I trimmed back this crazy vine that grows like a monster each spring.  I had powerwashed the entire house a few months ago, and the ceiling was still pretty clean and smooth, so the only prep I did was to wipe to the ceiling off with a wet cloth and spackle a few dents and cracks.

Here is the porch after the vine got a haircut and I moved all the potted plants and stuff off the porch.

Here are a couple of the cracks that I spackled.

I taped the edges with blue tape to keep the paint job tidy.

Here is the paint and a trusty short handled 2" angled trim brush.  The ceiling is only about 12 ft x 5 ft - easily covered with just a quart of paint.

And here is the actual color:



Here are a couple of photos of the ceiling after 2 coats of Winsome Blue:

And here are a couple of photos from the front yard.  I like the way this looks: a little shot of color but very subtle. 

 And that's all I have for now.  Today is Halloween so am going to go put on my white pallor makeup, tease my hair, put on my prom dress and cover myself with fake blood.  Happy Halloween!

Solar Screens

Girlschool. Badass rock'n'rollers.  Fashion icons.

It's hot, bright, humid, miserable. My personal constitution protests when it's over about 75 degrees, plus the continuous air conditioning, the weight of the heavy atmosphere and the ugliness of the summer is driving me to excessive beer consumption.  Some would say this is not a bad thing at all, but I say someone please give me a summer house in the cold Siberian mountains...
We have four windows on the west side of our house.  In the winter it's fine (as is everything), but in summer the sun beats down through those windows and makes a fiery furnace of our living room and kitchen.  We planted a couple of Burr Oak trees west of the windows  last year, but they're still pretty small so no life saving shade for us yet.

Here are the trees, still puny....

In order to not melt this summer I decided some kind of intervention was in order.  A pool?  I wish.  Nope, we got solar screens.

Solar screens look like regular outside window screens but are made from a sun blocking fabric.   Solar screens are mounted on the outside of the window.  This provides "shade", just like a tree would, but also blocks the sun from heating up window glass and interior floors, so no heat radiation. 

You can make solar screens from kits that are available at home supply stores, but we decided to skip the self-labor and ordered custom screens. We shopped around a little, and settled on a husband/wife solar screen supplier.  They came and measured our four windows, sent us an invoice, and when the screens arrived from their supplier 10 days later they installed them.  

But before the screens went in we had to paint the frames of the four old peeling windows.  A horrible job.  Especially in the 103 degree sun that fries that side of the house 10 hours a day.  This meant either getting up at the crack of dawn and getting the bulk of the work done then (not very likely), or working in short shifts during the hot daylight hours so we wouldn't get sunstroke.

Here is picture of me all slathered up with sunscreen on my way outside to work on the windows.  I think it's probably about noon.  We are not morning people.

Here is picture of one of the windows.  Notice how much work it needs.

Dan broke out the paint scrapers and sander.   This job takes absolutely no cortex power at all, just elbow grease, sweat, swearing and blind determination to get it done.

Next up was priming.  I like Kilz primer a lot.  I also like those paint brushes with the short handles that make it super easy to paint trim, but they cost like 12 bucks.  Ever the cheapo, I cut the handle off a 2" angled brush to achieve the same thing. This saved me about 5 bucks!

I taped off the windows with painters tape and dug in.  Here is a window after priming.

And here is a window after 2 coats of high gloss black paint.

When you paint window frames you have to make sure the paint doesn't dry while the window is closed.  Open the window about an inch before the paint dries.  Then close it about 15 minutes later, and repeat this cycle maybe eight times so the window won't be stuck forever from dried paint.

A couple of days later the solar screens were installed. We got black 90% screen fabric with white frames.  I think they look cool.

And speaking of cool, the living room and kitchen are probably 10 degrees cooler now, giving the AC a big break.  The room is darker, as if we had trees outside instead of screens, but totally worth it.

Here is a picture of the west side of the house before and after the screens.

It will be interesting to see if our electric bill is less.  But regardless, the rooms are cooler, and the outside looks 100% better.

Junk To Jewel: Office Reading Chair

Les Variations...they're French and they rock!

I decided to share a junk to jewel moment on the blog today.  Check out the junk, here:

My brother, Ben, bestowed this chair upon us.  It  had been left outside in the Austin weather for who knows how long and was in pretty sad condition but I have always liked this cool vintage chair and could not add it to the bonfire.  I figured it would be a great reading chair for our recently finished office...but man oh man did it need a butt load of  work.

The existing 50 year old upholstery, cushions and springs were decayed and rusty, so with beaucoup elbow grease, a lot of swearing and a little blood all this stuff was wrestled away.  It's amazing how many hundreds of upholstery nails had been used, and the craftsmanship of the original upholstery...well, hats off to those creative artists who know how to do it.  Upholstery is so cool.

Here is the bare chair.  Ready to be sanded and ready for all those nail holes to be filled.

I reinforced the joints with wood glue and clamped them for 24 hours. I filled the nail holes and various dents with plastic wood putty.  I sanded some more, and sanded, sanded, sanded and sanded.

I decided to skip the upholstery shop and tackle this project myself  the cheapskate's way by installing a new seat and back out of plywood, and making new cushions out of foam and batting.

 

 Here are the back and seat plywood pieces I cut with a skill saw.  I screwed the boards to the chair with 1" screws.  The new seat and back help to strengthen the chair frame. And then I sanded some more until this chair frame was as smooth as Serge Gainsbourg.

At this stage I primed the chair and painted it with 2 coats of a high gloss black latex, and topped it off with 2 layers of clear poly coat.

Next I measured for foam cushions.  I went to a local upholstery supplier and they cut the foam to my measurements.  I ended up getting extra firm 4 inch foam for the seat and a softer 3 inch foam for the back.

  I covered them with 1" thick quilt batting to soften up the edges and give them a little more cushiness.

I hand stitched the batting together.  Really easy to do and doesn't have to be pretty since all that stitching will be covered.

 Here are the cushions covered with batting.

 Here is the cotton muslin I used to for the cushion inner cover.

  I cut an upper and lower square of muslin for each cushion, pinned them together with the right sides facing in, and stitched them up on the trusty Riccar sewing machine.

 I trimmed the seam edges to half an inch, below.

 Here are my new cushions.  Now I just had to make the outer covers.

I had this black and white oval IKEA fabric lying around that both Dan and I like and I also had this floral fabric that I like, though Dan nixed the flowers.  Too girly I guess.  Dan ordered a moratorium on pink awhile ago, but now on flowers too?   Solution: make both.

I am not going to go into detail on how I made these cushion covers except to say it was really easy and almost exactly the way I made the muslin covers.  Seriously.  Measure, cut, pin, sew, and you got cushion covers. Oh, and Velcro is my friend.  I didn't want to go out in to the hideously fiery weather and schlep to the fabric store to get zippers for these cushion covers so instead I stitched on some Velcro I already had.  Works great. 

Then I stuck some of those felt covered tack things on the bottom of the chair legs to ward off floor scratches.

And here it is!  Our new junk-to-jewel office reading chair.  A lot of work but totally worth it.

The Mighty Mighty Powerwasher

 The only band that matters this week is M.O.T.O.

Hair stylists.  I love mine.  And, besides attending to the coifs of many Austinites, he is pretty handy himself.  We swap house project stories when I'm in his chair getting cut and colored.  He is currently creating his new salon and is doing a lot of the work himself.  I love a guy that can make my hair look fantastic one minute and rip out a wall the next.  When I told him (while my head was in the shampoo sink) that the outside of our house was looking a little grungy he mentioned that he owns a powerwasher and kindly offered to lend it to us.  We had been thinking of powerwashing the house exterior for awhile but just never got around to renting the machine to do it.  No more excuses.  A couple of days ago we picked up Randy's powerwasher at his salon.

Here is the Honda 6.0 HP/3000 PSI/2.5 GPH PowerWasher.

It's really easy to use.  Attach your regular old garden hose, attach the sprayer wand, add a little gasoline, fire it up just like you would a power lawn mower, and look out.  It could literally rip your face off.

Dan tackled the back and one side of the house in pretty good time...maybe a total of 4 hours.  He came in soaking wet because when washing the eaves the water pours down right on top of you.  No way around that.  But the back and side of the house, and the little patio thing in back, look sparkling and bright.  Years of grime and gunk gone.  What a difference!

Then yesterday it was my turn.  I tackled the porch, front and other side of the house.  And the limestone flower beds.  And some windows.  And some screens.  And the driveway.  I was warned that once you start powerwashing you will want to powerwash everything.  It's true.

Here are some pictures of yesterdays session.  As you can seen there is a lot of streaky dirt on our vinyl siding.  We are not huge fans of vinyl siding but that's what came with the house and for now is ok.

As you can see, our house is really white under all that dirt. 

And here you can see that powerwashing can make a huge difference...check out the color of this limestone before and after!

And the porch.

Black wrought iron swirly porch things before:

And after:  Powerwashing is kind of like sand blasting.

The old paint on all these old windows is cracking and peeling.  We are in the process of sanding and prepping them and will repaint them black eventually, but this powerwasher helped quite a lot with paint removal!  Less work for us!

Windows before:

And after. 

Here is a picture of the driveway.  It needs new blacktop stuff on it but it sure is clean now.

Here is our porch ceiling.  On our May road trip we went to New Orleans and took a little walking tour of the Garden District, and I noticed that most of the porch ceilings on the amazing old houses were painted sky blue.  Must be a Southern thing. Now that it's really clean I decided we need to paint our porch ceiling sky blue, too.  Another project to add to the list.

And here are some of those gorgeous Garden District houses with blue porch ceilings.  Major drooling.

And here is the front of our house after the powerwashing session is done.  Looks really crisp and clean.

This was not a bad way to pass a hot June day because I was soaking wet the whole time.  Powerwashing works, and is actually kind of fun to do.  Glad we finally got this done.

Cat update: This guy is doing great, and getting bigger.  And he finally picked a name.  He calls himself Otis.