Indecent proposition: a paint by any other name

Indecent repose

A famous architect once posed the question "ask the brick, what does a brick want to be?" This architect was of course Woody Harrelson and the answer is that a brick wants to be a fighter pilot because being a brick is boring and fighter pilots are casual and cool and invented the windmill hi-five for beach volleyball. Obvious choice.

Being that the bricks in our wall were stuck in their fired clay form we decided to at least make them an arch.  Arches were once the preferred method of spanning brick openings but that was really only from a time before man had invented steel and the structural engineer.  Also, lots of curved things have to go under the curved openings and that gets tricky (read expensive).  Undeterred we drew up a door to fit the arch- paid the 'custom' price and fitted the semi round peg in the semi round hole.... The real challenge has come with the interior trim as I scoffed at the pre manufactured price and have been scratching my head ever since.  It's been at about 90% for about 11 months now.

We will say we are very pleased with the function and the form.

Of note is the paint we chose to use.  We went all-out on the door paint and even hired a pro painter to do the work.  A guy who goes by the name Color Alchemist.  John (the alchemist) has spent a long time in closed quarters with some pretty heavy solvents so when he recommended the intense  finish work I was a little skeptical....  Ultimately it was a two week process of prep and paint with a specialty lacquer paint that turned out with a finish like a new car.  Excellent work by a true craftsman and with luck the paint will outlast the user.

With bricks and owners satisfied we can turn our focus to exterior completion. 

Champagne Problems; Building Rome in a day.

The birth of city planning?

As Bob Villa famously said "Rome wasn't built in day"... and with that I too would like to compare the self aggrandizing experience of home renovation with the planning and execution of of a city-state and cultural capital.  I always thought that phrase invited some exaggeratory comparisons but now... I'll gladlypoint out how the challenges of our lives approximate Romulus or Remus  - duh we have a dog already so this narrative writes itself.

wolf mother?

Now as Rome has always been fabled to have been built on a hill our house differs by having been built in a hole - the curiosity of the rear yard was always that it was about 3 feet higher than the first floor - you walked up to the front door and up again to the rear yard.  This combined all the function of first floor access with the light and airiness of basement living.  Always on the to-do list was the excavation of the rear yard to get it below the first floor.  Having wielded spade and pick in the past we were all too anxious to dig deep once again.... into our wallets for professional help (lol puns are critical to understanding the narrative of Rome).  So we found Jose and his crew to handle the digging and retaining of earths. 

All was looking great up to this point until the demands started coming for greater sums of the budget to be paid and claims of completeness were unverified.  And so we were forced to do what any disgruntled owner would do... and fire the help as passive aggressively as possible.

(via text message) 

A month or two of setback and a replacement mason had us back on track at about October of last year just in time for a very important event.