Landscaper blew me off again!

I called the landscaper at 11:30 and he said he was in a meeting and would call me when it was done and let me know what time he was coming. Needless to say, I got no call. He had also given me directions to drive by a house that he had done a gate on. The directions were go East on X Street and turn left on Y. The problem is, those two streets don't intersect. I wasted time today doing this (fortunately not much, but still). Yes, I know we could hire someone else, but this guy was by far the best when we were screening landscapers back in the winter. Also, hiring someone is not instantaneous. It would probably be several weeks before we could select someone by the time I called a bunch of people, set several appointments, carried out the appointments (1-2 hours each), checked references, etc and picked someone.

I've been working on staining the doors. I call it staining for convenience - I'm really finishing them with a clear finish. But staining is a more accurate word than painting. I've learned I could never be a painter. It's so tedious! Everyone loves wielding a brush, but that's only about 10% of your time. The rest is spent in prep and cleanup. I just find everything but the brushing way too tedious and boring. The doors look great! Pictures will be posted at a later date. I got the last door mostly prepped today. The other two doors have 2 of 3 and 1 of 3 coats respectively. It may seem odd to be jumping from door to door instead of finishing one, but as long as the door is uncoated you run a big risk of damaging it. So, the priority was to get at least one coat on all the doors. Also, the product I'm using often takes several days to dry thoroughly. As difficult as it is to schedule a door staining day (I have to be able to stay home with the door open for 6 hours or so), I don't want to waste any waiting for the stain to dry. It's not so bad, it just means I have blue tape up on all the doors for a long time.

Today I expected to get the side door prepped and stained. I ended up only being able to get the prep done because I found water damage on the threshold. I used a power sander (thank goodness I have one) to remove most of it, but there was detail work in the corners which took a long time to do by hand. Once I finished the sanding, there wasn't time to stay home with the door open.

I also worked on putting one piece of trim on the one window in the house that is ready for trim (the others are in various states of being shellacked, including some that haven't been started at all due to having been recently re-replaced). The window trim is extremely time consuming. I lost count at 700 hours, but at that point I wasn't even a third done and now I lost a significant amount of that time due to having to re-replace 4 of the windows. At this rate, it will take more than a year of full-time equivalent work to shellack and finish the trim on the windows (not counting window treatments). Speaking of window treatments, we still don't have any unless you count the junkyard collection of plastic, tarps, and newspapers we have taped up to give us privacy. The shades can't be installed until the trim is done. Ugh.

It took about 2 hours to get one 34" piece of trim up. As most people will tell you, any sort of trim is much more difficult than it looks due to the 3-dimensionality of it. Our house is old and none of the walls are plumb so often the window sticks out at the top and doesn't clear the wall at the bottom. Add to this a bad drywall patch by both our prior incompetent contractor and the handyman I hired to fix it and it was a real problem. I ended up chipping away the drywall and plaster which was built up too much around the window. i put the trim up in the "trench" I chipped out around the window. Once we get ready to patch the walls (for the third time) and paint (for the second time) I'll fill the trench in with drywall mud. It's a bit of a cheat, and the trim will sit somewhat embedded in the wall, but it's pretty minor and to fix it correctly would be a major undertaking. I shouldn't have been surprised, but was, at how long it took to get one trim piece up. my goal is to have this one window ready for trim when my mom comes for a visit so she can help me buy a shade for it. (buying window shades is way more complex and expensive than you might think, and i don't want to make a mistake).