I wish I knew how make the rain go away

because I'd quickly tell the people in the UK how to do it.

Unfortunately, I apparently only know the reverse: how to guarantee rain will come. The trick to that is to start painting the outside of your house.

Yup. Roo & I, assisted by my parents (put those elders to work! There was a Globe & Mail story recently which said "Older citizens – 60 and up – are not the drain on society that they are often made out to be, according to a report released Tuesday. Canadians between the ages of 60 and 79 contribute $2.2-billion in tax payments each year and $3.1-billion in volunteer work, HSBC Bank Canada said in issuing the results of a global survey conducted for the bank by Oxford University's Institute of Ageing." You can pay to buy the rest of the article here but that's pretty much it), decided to paint our house.

We got a quote for having it done and both Roo & I quickly came to the conclusion that the amount quoted would conveniently match the amount needed for something like an all inclusive holiday in Mexico (but it wouldn't go far enough to pay for the parental units so they'd get to dog sit in the beautifully painted house instead; seemed like a good plan to us). And the house is small, right? We kept looking at it and saying things like, 'yes, it's a small house. I mean I could do this side in a day on my own!' To be completely honest, Roo never said such stupid things, because he's sensible and also he can estimate volume and distance and space. That would have been me making those inane predictions. Because I can't find the correct size container for putting left over spaghetti in so certainly don't trust me to estimate how big a wall is and how long it would take to put 2 coats of paint on it.

Anyway, we started painting a while back - I can't even remember when exactly - but I know it was in the beginning of a huge record-breaking heatwave. It was so hot that paint was drying out on my paint tray before I could get it on the siding. We were eating an endless stream of popsicles, working mostly on the north side of the house. The south side could only be worked on from about 5:30 am to 9 or 10. Then the heat got too much. The east side went back into shade around 3. The west side is a story all of its own.

We liked so many things about this house when we bought it, but we both said, "the color has got to go." To be honest, it wasn't a totally unsuitable color for a lactation consultant. Our main house color was the color of breastfed baby poo - kind of a blah yellow. The trim was the color of a toddler poo, once the infant has started eating solids - yes, a truly ugly brown. I know people think LC's are all about boobs but actually mostly what I'd be concerned with is poo. How much? What color? What consistency? Because - here's a quick lesson in breastfeeding - breasts don't come with little calibrations to tell us how much a baby has eaten; but what goes in, must come out, and so the volume and consistency and color of baby's outputs is of great interest to LC's.

So there we were, living in a house the color of poo. If this is your house color now, and you're happy with it and think it looks smashing, then please don't let your feelings be hurt when I say I thought it was hideous.

The brown trim absolutely had to go, although we're swimming against the house color fashionista tide; there is a big revival in using very dark colors (charcoal, navy and black) for trim around here. I'm squarely in the light color trim camp. On most houses it looks better and I think it will also stand the test of time. The dark trim on the newer houses will date them & soon people will be saying, 'man, that's so 2007'.

So, light trim, and let me tell you, our garage now looks like a Zinsser outlet with the amount of primer cans we have lying around here, because of course, if you want to go dark to light, you have to prime first.

And then the housecolor itself - very very neutral, earthy greige. (Yes, that is a word.) It's a color that's sometimes beige, sometimes grey - hence, greige. Oh, feel free to groan about how b-o-r-i-n-g that is. But I love it. It's natural and calm and heaven knows, I need some calm in my life.

Here is the baby poo colored house we bought:


Here's the crew: my mom, my dad (he's the nudist), Amelia, Roo - the tall guy. Hugo was on strike.


And the finished product:


Not bad. Except it's like a movie facade - only the front is done (almost; Roo stil wants to trim the windows with some nice board. The fake shutter things are not going back on - yuck. Oh and the front door is actually going to be replaced one day but for now, it just got painted. And the little wrought iron fency things - we don't know what the heck we're doing with those. And if you click on the picture you'll read my rant on the plant that's eating my house. But generally, it's done.)

See how small and reasonable the house size is from this perspective?

But it's on a slope.

There's a full walk out basement in the back.

Which means it's much, much taller on the other side.

We got to about this point when two things happened: Roo needed to go back to work, and the rains came. Huge rains (well not as huge as the ones in the UK) but with rainfall and wind warnings and even a power outage for us.

And with the rains, came another little problem: we discovered a leak in the roof on the west side. Good thing we hadn't started to paint that side at all yet, because the water pouring all over it would have washed away all the paint.

So we got to take a break from painting the outside, ponder the roof and some other things that cropped up - because it's like the "If you Give a Mouse a Cookie" story - new things keep popping up and they all seem to involve money and time. Cookies and milk and paper and crayons I could handle. Downspouts, leaks, wiring, outdoor motion detector lights, and replacement fabric for rollout awnings are much less charming and considerably more painful on the bank account.

Gotta run - I have an inside painting project on the go (you didn't think I'd be sitting around reading HP 7, did you? I'm finished that.) and the weather is supposed to go back to sunny this week, which will mean hopping back on the ladders to cover up poo with greige.