NEVER ENDING house painting project

This is what my house looked like about 3 years ago. I've always loved my house and thought from the very first time I saw it that it was really cute. The blue paint made it look more like a little country cottage but I was never really feeling it. It was a bit too old lady for me. Lucky for me, the paint was in horrible shape and it was well passed time for a new paint job. So when I was pregnant with Max (yes, over 2 years ago) and my nesting instincts were kicking in we decided to repaint the house. We were so ambitious and completely convinced that we would have it done before Max was born. Ha! Turns out that we were actually delusional. Once we got into it we realized that the cedar shingle siding was in pretty bad shape and it was going to take TONS of preparation for the wood to actually be ready for new paint.
We had to scrape off as much of the old paint as we possibly could. A lot of people tell me that we should just pressure wash it but we know from experience with another house we painted before that a pressure washer would just damage the old wood even more. So, scraping it was. Do you see all of the cracks between each of the wood shingles in the photo above? Well, we had to fill all of those with caulk. And most of those wood shingles was also pretty loose so we had to nail them all back in too. Then of course a coat of primer to seal it all up. I told you, it became quite the process just to be able to paint.

Before Max was born we got 2/3 of the front of the house done. The next summer I got half of one side prepped and primed. If you looked at our house from the right angle you could see brown paint, blue paint, white primer and exposed wood all at once. It was like that for over a year. This year I have gotten completely sick of the multi-color house and my ambition came back. Max is big enough now that he can play pretty well on his own while I work on the house. My siblings have also been helpful and dedicated entire saturdays for helping me out.

Don't get too excited for me though because I'm not done quite yet. We've barely touched the north side of the house and there's a lot of trim work and touch up stuff to do.
We will be working on it again this Saturday and probably every Saturday as long as the weather decides to be lovely for us. I'm really hoping to get it all done before winter sets in. I would be happy if I could focus on my yard again in the spring instead of working more on my still unfinished house.

But, isn't it gorgeous??? (except for the white railing on the porch which will become black when I get around to that touch up work I mentioned) I really Really REALLY adore my little old house. I plan to live here for the rest of my life so it's worth all of the hard work, right?

I like to look at it from this angle and pretend that it is finished and that I will never have to touch a paint scraper or caulk gun again. :) It will be totally worth it all in the end... just keep cheering me on so I don't run out of steam before I get there! :)