BMoxies 2nd Ever Photo Week – Day 1 (Shades of Ed) :: Test Painting Colors

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For more on Photo Week 1, and well — 2, please see Friday’s post.

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AKA: Shades of Ed or . . . A Guy* Paints Test Swatches on our Shed

Location: Baltimore, MD (Lauraville)

In This Photo:

To figure which colors to use in painting our house in 2006, we started with some test painting on the shed.  This shed was site-built and clad with T1-11 (a type of treated yet inexpensive siding).  It had/has a corrugated stainless steel roof.  While our tests here centered around green, we actually stained the house a tannish color.

Also in this picture:  A guy named Ed we “had” for a brief period.  To the left, antique clam rockers that we did ultimately re-paint.  An empty Folgers container makes for a great paint pail (it has a built-in handle).

Additional Information:

With all the challenges my wife and I have had with agreeing on things around or about our homes, no single decision has sparked more debate than “What color should we paint the house?”  In the last six years, we have done it twice — painted the exterior of two houses.  To help make these decisions easier, we painted test areas.  For our last house we started with the shed — made sense.  And for this, we enlisted the help of Ed.

I met Ed only a few weeks before this picture.  Just asgot my ladder set to begin painting the brick on the side of our rental property.  Ed was “a guy” and he talked me into letting him paint that 60×20 wall that day.

While I never knew Ed’s exact age, he was a Vietnam Vet and was at the time living on disability.  He was, as I understood it from his girlfriend, often too sick to work.  But still we had him out, and for a few weeks in the Fall of ’06, he worked for us.  Jen would drive downtown to pick him (and his girlfriend – whose name I forget) up each morning.  He never missed a scheduled day, worked hard, and got a lot done. He always took my brushes home to clean and return like new the next day.  It was a great experience.  And it did make me a little sad when I heard a few years later that he had passed.  Ed was a good man.

*Guy (or “a guy”) – An individual hired “under the table” to perform common handyman or maintenance tasks.

Additional Links:

While this 12×10 shed was easy enough to paint with roller and brush. A pro painter we knew painted the 2600sf house proper with a sprayer.  It’s really more a job for something like Wagner SprayTech Corp.‘s Power Painter® Line with Wagner’s exclusive EZ Tilt™ technology, at minimum.  To see this tool in action check WagnerPainting‘s YouTube channel, here. Find It on Amazon, here.

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Thanks and comments welcome. ~jb