Advice to my past self about fence painting

First things first: the paint can hack I tried worked so well that I want everyone to know about it:

You can buy pour spouts for regular-sized paint buckets, but a) this is a two-gallon, not a one-gallon bucket, b) I am only sometimes, not always, not pathologically frugal, and c) most importantly, I feel like this probably works better than a rigid pour spout would.

I thought, when I first saw it, that this hack was merely about narrowing the opening the paint poured through, so that it wouldn't spill so badly. And I'm not saying that doesn't help. But if you carefully observe where the tape meets at a point in front of the bucket, you can see it forms a weird almost-triangle for the paint to pour over. If you lay that tape-triangle across whatever you're pouring the paint in to, the paint flows right across it and you can even wipe it off with a brush if you want and it works so well that it's fun and makes you wish that the entire job consisted of paint-pouring.

So. Now you know about the exactly one part of the fence-painting process that has gone smoothly.

I'm not even going to try to tell you what I did in order, because it was such a disorganized mess that I can't remember. What I can give a little more coherent an account of is what I should have done. 

Part of the problem is that my problem is so unusual: after all, who paints a half-rotted fence in high-gloss paint, waits five (or more-- not even sure) years, and then repaints it? I mean, me, obviously, at least for the repainting part, but while I would normally try to do some research into the best way to attack house-repair problems, this one was so weird that I didn't feel like that was a viable option. 

(I keep wondering if it's even worth it, since I'm pretty sure that the fence is going to need to be entirely rebuilt in 5-10 years, but I WAY don't have it in me to rebuild it this year, and the paint color, barn orange, does stand out for weirdness/ugliness in the neighborhood.)

But, as I said, this is what I should have done. First, remember that you don't want to paint anything that is too rotted, so figure out some sort of scraping system that pulls off the most egregious stuff before you start. This maybe should have been obvious to me, but you will want to remove the largest debris first, and then work your way down to the smaller stuff. Here are some tools that will be helpful:

A Phillips-head screwdriver; a wire brush (which are evidently a terrible idea to use on grills, but since you aren't planning on cooking anything on this fence, let alone eating anything that has been cooked on it, you're good to go); and a plastic scrub brush you originally bought because the level of pollen on your front mat was deep and concerning, and you hadn't figured out yet that this is why power washers were invented (and borrowable from the library). 

Use the screwdriver to scrape away the vines that the last painting crew didn't bother to take care of, which are now rotting under the paint. Then, take that wire brush and scrape off what was left by the screwdriver. The plastic brush takes care of even smaller debris, and then after that it's time to power wash. 

Which, it turns out, is VERY fun. I have a friend who works for the Foreign Service, and before she went to one assignment in a high-conflict area, her training included learning how to use a machine gun. She said it was by far the most fun she had ever, ever had at a work training. I thought about her as I felt the kickback from the power washer and noticed that, while it's tiring, power washing is indeed also quite fun.

I have no current plans to get a job that requires me to learn how to use a machine gun, but I did what I could to live up using the power washer while I had it.

BTW, past self, please do yourself a favor, suck it up, and commit to moving the ladder around so that you can power wash the fence from the top down (instead of the side, as you keep trying to do), because that will be much more effective.

Also, don't even bother with the power sander. This high-gloss-paint-on-weathered-wood situation means that the power sander can't really reach most of the paint. You will eventually notice, in fact, that the sander is called a "finishing sander," and the painting situation you are in calls for beginning sanding if there ever was such a thing. 

Fine-grit sandpaper is maybe 200-400 grit. Medium sandpaper is 100-150 grit. Coarse is 60 grit. You will briefly consider driving an extra 20 miles to get 36-grit sandpaper, but listen to me, you could skip all that and go straight to buying the not-to-be-used-on-a-grill metal bristle brush. After you've used it to get the debris off, as I described above, you can use it to rough up the entire high-gloss surface of each board in preparation for priming it.

And, as is so often the case, I'm too tired to write any more tonight! Next week-- er, in two weeks-- I'll see how much further I can get in the Saga Of The Not Yet Painted Fence.

Happiness in Sewing, and also Happiness in Happiness

The wedding dress came out lovely. My apologies-- I don't have a picture of the whole finished thing, let alone of the bride in it, but here is a random process picture: 

One of the nicest compliments I've ever gotten on my sewing happened when the bride's mother, who has more experience than I do, sewed right over my basting stitches on the shoulders which I had modified. (I'd left the basting in rather than doing the final sewing myself just in case she wanted to fix anything I had done.) After that, she told me that the front of the hem looked just right, and since I had pinned-then-basted it three different times at that point, I felt both gratified and justified. I told her I will be eating those compliments for a year, which is true.

I told my friend, the bride, that I had thought about trying to finish up a blue dress I had been working on in time to wear it to the wedding, but because her colors were blue and white, I had decided not to. She told me that to the contrary, she would be thrilled if she looked out at the congregation and saw a sea of blue. 

So, I spent the next day doing my own sewing-over-basting, and I wore the dress to the wedding on Friday night, and then again to church the following Sunday. I felt SO pretty. I'm pretty sure that at this was at least partly due to the "growing your own vegetables" effect-- kids (and grownups) who are involved in gardening often love to gulp down produce they've had a hand in growing. But I don't think it was all that. It's a good color on me, anyway, and it doesn't look home made, which is a win.

At the wedding itself, the most curious thing happened. As the couple met at the front of the room and the ceremony started, I found myself unable to stop grinning. This also happened at the last wedding I went to, a year ago March, and it surprised me then, too.

Because, true confession time, I wasn't this happy at any of my siblings' weddings, nor at my friends' weddings, even a decade ago. This is new for me, and it's lovely, and I wish I had found it earlier, but better late than never, no? I'm so grateful that "years ago" (to quote my father) I was paying attention in a church meeting where a leader encouraged us to learn to be happy for others. At the time I thought this was slightly odd advice, but I've tried to take it, and maybe it hadn't sunk in ten years ago, but maybe it has now.

I remember years ago (there's that phrase again!) a friend quoting her religion professor saying that after you are married, there are only team points. I fully believed that then, and I fully believe it now. But the thing that I've been realizing, as I've pondered how delighted I am to have found my "happiness for others" mojo, is that I'm pretty sure that all points are team points. We're humans; we're children of God. That's the team I'm on, and that I want to be on. 

(But, me being a mortal, fallible human, it sure does help to feel like I have some wins, too, even if they are smallish and have to do with sewing and professional life-- more on that later.)

Adventures in (clothing) alteration

At church a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a friend about how I'd made my own dress for a gala (at the Library of Congress! I'm still floating a little bit over that one). She said she wouldn't mind learning how to sew, but sewing machines always break on her. I knew exactly what she was talking about; I told her about my own sewing machine trauma and how to this day, I kind of have a preference for hand-sewing over machine sewing.

I also mentioned that I now own a darn reliable sewing machine, if she ever wants to borrow it. She didn't want to borrow it for herself, but she did wonder if I might be willing to hem her wedding dress for her. And the answer was yes, of course!

When I got to her house and saw the dress on her for the first time, it became evident that the most pressing problem she faced was that the shoulders were way too big on her. I pinned the shoulders together, then marked the lines where the new seam lines would need to go by sewing these lines in a contrasting color of thread. (I've discovered the hard way that if you're planning to pick something out, it pays to have that thing be in a color that's easy to see.) Then I took apart the existing shoulder seams, matched up the seam lines I had marked, and basted (temporarily sewed) them together along those new lines.

It was a little more complicated than that because the dress is lined, but that is kinda-sorta-basically what I did during that first evening when I visited her house, thinking (ha!) that I could get this project done in one sewing session. I ended up taking the dress home with me after all, to work on in the evenings.

She also needed the dress hemmed, so I pinned it up at when I was with her, and then last night I finished hand-basting it up. I do plan on machine-sewing the hem in the end, but I wanted to make sure that I really had gotten the length correct before I cut any fabric. I do feel like hand-basting wins over pins pretty much every time; it's both sturdier and more flexible than pins. Not to mention the 100% reduced risk of getting stabbed on accident, either for the sewist or for the person being fitted.

The skirt has a gauzy outer layer and a much more opaque lining. I hand-basted both.

This dress also has a train, which she would like to have out of the way when she is dancing during the reception after the wedding. I did an internet search for how to deal with this, and came up with the idea of a "train pin," which is a way to pin the train up on the outside of the back of the dress, but we couldn't make it look good at all when we tested it out, so that was a no-go. However, she did like the idea of sewing a loop to the middle of the back of the train, so that she could carry her train without using her fingers. I installed this last night.

I used some grosgrain ribbon I had saved from some gift bag, which I couldn't bear to get rid of and which has been sitting in my stash of saved ribbons and strings for I don't even know how many years. I sewed it to the underskirt, and then picked apart the seam on the gauzy overlay fabric so that the loop could poke through. Tomorrow we'll try it on her again, just to make sure all the modifications work well, and then I'll hem the hem with my machine, as originally promised, and then I'll probably be done.

I am still working on the fence-painting project (the weather has been mostly perfect for it) but only felt enough umph to blog about one thing this week. But if you show up next week, I'll tell you about the very exciting world of power washing and about having the perfect roller brush and about why I bought catnip this last week, even though I don't have any plans to use it for a cat. Then there's also the excitement of finding rotting pieces of wood in places where there probably really shouldn't be rotting pieces of wood, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Come back next week and I'll tell all.

Oh. Also. If you want to see three more pages of the graphic novel and read a little bit about it, head on over to cordeliafernwood.com.

Delivering myself from famine

Friends! I am alive. At this exact moment I'm planning to start blogging here again as well as continue the new work blog I started a few weeks ago (at cordeliafernwood.com), but I know myself and I'm not... sure... how long this enthusiasm will last. Also I'm not sure if anyone who reads this blog isn't already my friend on Facebook, but if there is anyone who was waiting with bated breath for me to show up here again, hooray! I'm here again. 

So, at Cordelia Fernwood, I've made some stuff and I've sold some stuff, but I haven't sold very much stuff, which is to be expected at the beginning of a venture like this, but the upshot is that I shall be needing grocery money in the relatively near future, and luckily for me a fence-painting job is available for me to do and be paid for at this very moment. This is because my mother owns the building I live in, and she pays me to be her fixit human for my own house. Eventually I will run out of things to fix and at that point will either have to start selling more stuff or else find a real job, but for now the weather isn't heinous and it's a good time to be working outside.

The last time this fence was painted, the workmanship was, hm, how do I say, dubious. Without any apparent prep work whatsoever, such as sanding or even cleaning the surface to be painted, a high-gloss paint was sprayed on to the existing fence. For my part, after using progressively coarser sandpaper and considering driving an extra fifteen miles to pick up extra extra coarse sandpaper, I finally concluded that primer is my friend. (I also picked up a wire-bristle brush at Habitat for Humanity's ReStore, and it is FABULOSO at scuffing up hard-to-reach high-gloss fence parts that have no business being high-gloss.) Like this:

Also there is the top-end-of-the-fence-boards situation. Which is to say, none of the exposed end grain on the tops of the boards got painted during this high-gloss spray-painting job, but were left to weather naturally, which results in stuff like this:

In some cases, the ends don't have moss on them, but in some cases they do. I'm planning to paint the non-mossy ones, just to preserve them a tiny bit longer, but quite frankly the whole thing is going to have to be completely rebuilt within the next five to ten years, so I'm constantly wondering to myself which effort is worth it and which is not.

I did finally conclude that I should replace the most rotten boards on the gate, though. I use the gate every time I leave the house, and one of the boards on the front had rotted out so badly that only the screws that had held it in place were left at the top.

Behold the front of the gate, which already has three boards I've replaced (it's hard to tell, but they're a slightly different color from everything else because I primed them before I installed them ;)

Since I am a fan of whimsy and not a fan of regretting my decisions, I've decided that the crooked board on the far left on the front side is whimsical, and that I don't regret at all the fact that I totally forgot to sight down the long side of the board to make sure it was straight before I bought it. Really truly, though, I actually do think it kind of looks cute, and I'm also not kidding about the liking whimsy thing. 

You can see that the board on the far left on the inside of the gate is pretty ripped up on the bottom. I wasn't originally planning to replace it, but replacing the boards on the front of the gate went so well that I'm sort of thinking maybe I will after all. 

Aaand I'm out of time to write. Probably for the best. Check out cordeliafernwood.com if you're curious about what the first pages of the unfinished graphic novel look like, or what the mostly-finished paper Nativity or paper Easter Set look like, or if you want to read more ramblings about creative work and, like, stuff.

Gluchlich

The German word for happiness- well, probably one of the words, but since my German isn't very good it's the only one I know-- is "Gluchlich." And this used to bother me, just a little, because it is so clearly related to the English word "lucky." It irritated me to think that an entire language could seriously assume that happiness was up to luck, that you couldn't influence your own fate about this most basic of psychological needs. I know very well indeed that we aren't always in perfect control of our emotional lives, but this seemed to be a bridge too far.

Then I read a book by Tony Danza, of Who's the Boss fame, about doing a TV reality show in which he taught a high school English class for a year in a tough high school in Philadelphia. (The book's title is I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had.) What I mostly got out of that book was that good teaching doesn't necessarily make for good reality TV, because good teaching inherently involves less drama than reality TV needs. But towards the beginning, as he was talking about how he got to the point of doing the reality TV show, he talked about how he had many friends who were just as talented and just as hardworking has he had been, but that getting the role in Who's the Boss was a lucky break for him. It was his way of acknowledging that he was no better than-- well, maybe not anyone else, but many of the people he knew and respected. I liked that--and suddenly I became a lot more OK with Gluchlich as a concept. 

I am aware that happiness can be cultivated-- that's the hardworking part. But somehow I feel calmer and happier myself when I know there's some unfairness built into the system. If I don't have as much as someone else, it isn't automatically because I wasn't as good as them at something. It even, oddly, makes it easier to be happier for them. If you know it isn't a perfectly balanced system to start with, there's no use weeping or wailing when it shows itself to be what you already knew it was. :D

The Garden Lantern

Last spring some time I was in Kohl's with a $5 off $5 coupon, and I wandered around until I found the thing I was supposed to buy, which was a solar garden lantern. I'm getting better at this with buying things-- finding what is just right and then going with that. I kind of wish I were so confident in picking out people to be friends with, but people are not things and money is much simpler (and in some ways more dangerous) than exchanges of friendship, so perhaps I should be content.

Anyway, I brought it home and then set it by my door to wait until I figured out exactly where in the garden I wanted to put it. I wanted it to be useful, but I also didn't want to attract mosquitoes close to the front door.

But I also-- and this is the extremely silly part, but it's funny and I'd rather make someone laugh than make them think I'm never ridiculous-- I also hesitated to put it out because I was afraid that the weather would get to it. The garden lantern. That was designed to be out in the weather. So, as I mentioned, I propped it in its corner between my front closet and my front door, and periodically it would fall over, and I would think to myself that I should put it out, and I would worry again about the weather, and I wouldn't do it.

Then last Thursday or so, I realized that while it was designed to deal with the weather, it wasn't designed to be tipped over and fall on the ground repeatedly, and that I should just put in in a spot already. You see, unlike lighting designed for the indoors, this garden lantern didn't have anything flat to rest on; it had a pole with two spikes at the end, meant to be driven into the ground. So I took it out and within about three seconds realized that the perfect spot was just inside the garden gate, and I felt very silly for not having put it there before. And I was so pleased with how it looked as I went out for my walk on Sunday evening that I took a picture of it as I left the house, and that is the picture that I show you now:

I suppose there's some useful moral to be learned from all this, though I'm not quite sure what. I'm just thankful that my silliness didn't result in the poor lantern being broken without ever having been used. The sight of it brings me happiness every time I see it.

Child Abuse Prevention Training

 A new school year is about to begin in our district. This means, among other things, that I have been diligently completing online training modules, including one which is sometimes known among staff members as "child abuse prevention training."

But it isn't, not really. It's actually a training on what our legal responsibility is if we suspect a child has been abused: which is to say, we must report it promptly to the proper authorities. I've cried after work every single time I've had to submit one of these reports, BTW, but having emotions about a legal responsibility doesn't absolve you of said responsibility. Also, it's not a huge percentage of days. I've only ever had to submit at most one a year, and my job for the past several years has involved so little direct interaction with the kids that I haven't had a day like that for quite some time. 

I've been thinking about what it would be like if it were actual child abuse prevention training. If I were designing it-- and to be clear, I'm well aware that no one has asked me-- but if I were designing Child Abuse Prevention Training, I would have the first part be on how to recognize your emotions, the next part on how to appropriately deal with your emotions, and the last part on how much more important it is to be in control of yourself than of any child. 

For good measure, I'd probably throw in a few things about how to get children to do things without being abusive to them, because I know I am personally most at risk of child abuse when I feel like I have to get a kid to do a thing that for whatever reason isn't happening. Now that I think about it, I'd probably also have a bit about what is going through children's heads when they act a certain way. I've noticed an ever-greater tendency in our culture to attribute adult-style motivations and ideas to these young aliens who most often have no idea what is going on, want desperately to win our approval, and haven't learned yet how to regulate their own emotions (which, it's that much more difficult for them to do so when we are giving them poor examples ourselves). Maybe I'd end on a happy note with several videos of people telling "That could have gone south, but I managed to figure out how to stay in control of my emotions, ask for help as needed, and prevent child abuse" stories.

Thank you to Project Gutenburg for making this out-of-copyright image available!
I think this lady looks pretty calm and collected even though one of her charges looks less than enthusiastic about nap time (or wherever they're going) don't you?