Paint the House

The sabbatical also seemed like a good time to tackle the long standing bucket list item of painting the house.  I saw a team painting an historic house in Tustin on my weekly coffee constitutional and figured it was a good omen.  

Before-- also before the drought completely killed boxwood and magnolia

Four weeks of 6 day weeks of prep and paint work, a sizable chunk of change, and we're pretty much done.  

MacGyver and I are still adjusting to it.  The house went from being creepy farm house that happened to have a dense city grow up in its orange groves while it was collecting ghosts and cobwebs to it to being a more urbane SFO painted lady wannabe.  

Part of the insecurity might be because my art training ended abruptly in middle school.  I think there is also a bit of remorse that we don't have the excuse of "the house is a fixer upper" to use to explain our rather lax house and grounds keeping practices.  A lot of it is a perplexing reaction to a few critical remarks from people we care about that somehow wipe out the avalanche of compliments and kudos coming from others, now discounted as "just being polite."  At any rate, there is no HOA and it will need to be repainted again in a decade or so, so we have plenty of time to upgrade our gardens, learn about color palettes and find other reasons to estrange ourselves from relatives before our next rodeo.  

After-- Dunn Edwards Passionate Plum and Cobalt.  Metallic gold source unknown.

Pinterest inspiration... eeeh nailed it?