Preparing For A Big Day

We have had thunder and lightning here in the great Northwest for the past couple of evenings.  The humidity is high even though there has been very little rain.  The temperatures have been nice but the humidity adds a degree of discomfort that we don't always have however it is tolerable and Zach and I spent yesterday chalking and sanding the majority of the old house in Covington.

 I have a small handheld Porter Cable power belt sander that uses 2 1/2" X 14" belts.  It handled the job fairly well however it does run through the belts (I figured out why) and it gets a little hot to hold after a few hours of continuous sanding.  As for the belts, they are only available at Lowe's in our area.  Home Depot doesn't appear to carry this sander and therefore doesn't choose to stock the belts for it.  I bought all the belts I could at our local Lowe's and ended up at another one about 10 miles away after I ran out of belts.  It appears that the only thing that Lowe's carries is an assortment of belts, three to a package.  You get 50/80/120 grit in the assortment and the 120 may as well be plain paper when it comes to sanding paint on a house.  50 grit works great and the 80 grit can deal with it but it doesn't last as long as the 50 grit.  Going to my son's place of work, Amazon, I see that I can purchase sandpaper belts in specific grits to fit this unit but it is too late now since I have but one small section to finish.

 After the sander hits the siding we have the following results.  It does a good job of getting rid of the flaking paint and makes quick work of feathering all those nasty holes.

 We will be putting a full court press to paint the rest of the house today.  We have a little over half the house to finish.  We worked all last weekend and got a good portion of it done.  Our son, daughter in law and little James came over to participate in our little adventure.  Jeff said James wanted to help paint and he did.  We gave him a bucket and a brush with some paint and he threw it on the side of the house.  My hands were dirty or I'd have a picture.  It was pretty funny.

When he first got there, Zach and I were installing some replacement trim on the front of the house and James became very interested in pounding nails.  Zach pounded a nail into a piece of scrap wood and James spent a goodly portion of his time with us pounding that nail with a James size hammer.  I am not sure the nail moved.  As you can see, James was entertaining Honey.

Speaking of Honey, she was attacked by another much small dog on Monday.  A Yorkshire put some teeth marks in her, bruised her and chewed at one rear leg.  Needless to say she spent the day at the vet.  Mia said it was totally unprovoked and she had to kick the other dog to get it to let go.  The owner was very apologetic and even paid for our vet bill.  She is on light duty and healing nicely.  She is very apprehensive when walking around the neighborhood especially when she gets near the area where she was attacked.


I promised Zach we would be over about 10 am so I best close for now and get my butt moving.
Hope everyone is having a good time.