The Last Time in My Life

Solid weekend for sure.

We went to Corsicana yesterday and looked at some houses. We're no longer considering the Sycamore house. We took a video camera with us and really poked around in there to get some idea of what the place needs. It's more than we originally expected. There's water damage here and there (from an upstairs bathroom? A mysterious chimney that seems to originate nowhere?), plaster in bad shape in some places... More than we want to deal with.

People keep asking why we haven't found anything, and sometimes the tone is a bit incredulous. Hey, it's Corsicana. We see 4-5 houses when we go down, and it doesn't take much to rule one out. It's not that we're super picky. But take yesterday for example: We saw one with almost no back yard, one with slightly more back yard than that, a terrific house with a great yard that we loved for $50k more than we want to spend and a house so nice I felt like the poor relations just walking through the door for $75k more than we want to spend. So really, most of the houses we saw yesterday we could rule out from the get-go. I insisted on the one with the great yard just to see if I'd be overcome with desire to forego our financial limitations and make an offer. Nope.

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Was home today to do yard work. First off was to paint the eves.

Rented a pro-quality paint sprayer from Lowe's for an ungodly sum. They gave me a quick crash course and I came home to get to work.

I put the primer hose in the bucket, just like they said, and listened for it to sound like it was primed. I was about ready to shut off the priming mechanism when the hose popped out of the bucket and spewed paint all over me, the brick wall and the patio.

This wasn't starting out well. The clock was ticking on my four hours of rental time, and I already had a major cleanup job to do.

I grabbed the water hose and sprayed everything down the best I could. I'd already considered renting a high-pressure washer, and at this point I decided I had no choice but to do that one day soon.

I hit the start button on the sprayer and BZZT, it shocked me. I was standing in water and fiddling with an electric machine. Bad combination.

So, more cleaning up and drying things and I was ready to go.

Well... sort of.

One squeeze of the trigger and the corner of the eves was soaked with WATER. Seems that whoever cleaned it out before me hadn't bothered to get all the water out. Now the place I wanted to paint was WET.

More cleaning up and drying.

Finally got started in earnest, and discovered that no matter how you set the pressure, the sprayer basically shoots out a gallon of paint in about one minute. It was like holding a fire hose that shot paint. It was going on way too thick, and dripping everywhere.

I did eventually get a bit of a technique to help with this, but after covering about 2/3 of what I'd intended to paint and realizing that I was creating a tremendous cleanup job for myself, I cut my losses and decided to finish the rest by hand.

And that, boys and girls, is the last time in my life I will use a paint spraying gizmo not called a "can."

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Finishing by hand wasn't bad, and I got a new light put up in back and a lot of junk (like old wood from the eves) thrown out.

It's been one of those days when I've just been going nonstop. I'm happy to have accomplished so much, but man, I'm worn OUT. My legs and feet really hurt.

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Our house is likely to list starting Wednesday. We've got a great agent in our friend Renee Kocurek.

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Ya'll have a good week.