Which is actually kind of funny as many years of my childhood were spent nailing scrap lumber together in some form or fashion to quite a few of the trees in our neighborhood. We had "tree-houses" or "huts" EVERYWHERE. Most of them consisted of a few 2x4's nailed between two limbs, but to me they were like mini-mansions.
So this week, we got a break in the weather with temperatures dropping a bit and a forecast of mostly sunny skies. So we commenced to staining this ENTIRELY-TOO-FREAKIN-LARGE-ALL-WOODEN-STRUCTURE. After about two hours, I was chanting "BRICK-BRICK-BRICK" in a kind of weird cadence to my painting strokes. By the end of the second day, my right arm was visibly larger than my left.
Painting with stain onto raw lumber is a bit of a challenge. First it's thin, runny, and greasy. Second, You have to start from the bottom and work your way up, at least for the first coat in order to keep the stain more even. Third, if you are in the vertically-challenged category, you have to start painting "up" pretty darn quick, which means the stain is pretty much running down your brush, then down your hand, then down your arm, then into your armpit. So now my armpits have been stained brown, treated for borer bees and other pestilence, and sealed.
Thankfully, we have had lots of help. My Dad, who is almost seventy-five, painted all day just for a piece of fried catfish from Top Hat. He loves him some fried fish.
"WILL WORK FOR FRIED CATFISH"
This is pretty much how it looked after two days of work.
Then we pulled rank on the kids and managed to get one third of them for a full day of help. We promised them a slightly larger portion of their "inheritance" as compared to their other siblings who managed to find other "things" to do, like attending college out of state, helping out in a local beauty pageant, etc. Actually, if we were very smart we would have used their "inheritance" to have this FREAKIN HUGE WOODEN HOUSE stained by professionals instead of doing it ourselves! Thank you SO much Blake and Mason. You WILL definitely get that extra five dollars added to your "inheritance".
To get the higher parts done, we had to rent this handy-dandy piece of equipment. I maintained my argument that I was much more efficient working at "sea-level" and totally avoided the bucket truck. It did add a small element of fun for the boys with a "real-live-grown-up-size Tonka truck", but I think it would be a stretch to say that playing with the lift made the work "fun". Clara did however position herself in the bucket with whomever was in it, but without the benefit of paint and a paint brush....that was just too risky-putting a ten year old twenty to thirty feet above your head holding a bucket of stain that she could have dropped.
However, as the day was winding down, I finally relented and got in to give it a shot-after checking out the weight limit. I was too scared to try to operate it, so stupidly I allowed Blake to control it from below. So he proceeded to "park" me at one of the higher peaks with the base of the machine on one of the steeper slopes. Then I was told I could not come down until all the staining was done. All the while, the machine alarm is sounding as the base was not well-balanced. However, I did outsmart him in the end as I went up with a very small amount of paint in my bucket.
At any rate, as of late Saturday evening, most of the house has two coats of stain on it. The bad thing is, next week doesn't look too great for the weather to finish it up. And we have a huge machine-lifter-thingey rented for the week in which it probably will not be used. Too-bad, So-sad.....more "cha-ching" for AK Rentals who will gladly rent it to us for one more week.
