An excellent weekend on the house (pix below).
We’re into a cycle of solving problems and uncovering new ones, much like doing the Wuzzle’s room, which ended up taking months. I’m sort of mellow about it now – it’s just the way it’s going to be.
The solved problem was the porch’s front beam, which we’ve cased with new pine boards to make it look reasonably straight, and also to avoid having to strip all the old paint. The problem was to create a rectangle about 15” by 20’ in an irregular shape.
C., who has a better spatial sense than I do, suggested putting 1x12 on the bottom of the front beam, covering the leftover area on top with scraps, then concealing that with trim – I did it the other way round last weekend.
I was a bit self-conscious about the previous attempt, one, because it looked silly and lopsided, two, because the opposite neighbour is about to put his house on the market (it looks very Homes and Gardens; there were professional window-washers there this morning, and pots of geraniums have materialized on the front doorstep) and we are that house’s view. It’s a bit like the Melita house was before it was sold – a sort of idealized tableau of a house, rather than a place people might actually be living.
Anyway, the line between looking like a promising work in progress and looking like a bizarre disaster is a fine one, and my conscience is reasonably clear.
The new unsolved problem is the state of the front board on the gable, which (it became clear) really should be replaced. The curved ornamental boards are rotted a bit at the corners, and could be taken out and reproduced. I could use the router table, or maybe a fine blade on the jigsaw. Next weekend's project.