microdermabrasion for your house

Just thought I'd share my love of power washers. I spent Saturday morning power washing the front of our house, mainly to prep the shutters for painting (more on that scary topic later). If you've ever used one, you may know what I'm talking about here, but have you ever found that you never just wash what you plan to wash? I came across my front door and ended up blasting the paint of the threshold, and then my ADD took me on to the steps, and then the front walk. My steps look AWESOME! Like brand new. I didn't realize how dirty they were. I didn't know how varied the brick colors actually are because they were all just dirty reddish-brown and there was actually moss growing on one side. Not anymore! Unfortunately after I finished this and was ready to call it quits, I remembered that I had the whole other half of the front to finish. Dang my ADD!

Power washers. "If you don't have one, get one!" -Woody (Toy Story)

(OK, not that we actually have one ourselves. We call 1-800-DAD for all our powerwashing needs.)

Onto the shutters. If you noticed in past pictures of the house, the color pallette is very blah. Very light grey siding with white shutters. So we decided to paint the shutters and the door red. We thought we picked a burgandy-ish red, but when I was painting the test shutter on Saturday, I realized that people were going to think we're painting them just for Halloween. It is blood red. Seriously. Harland keeps assuring me that it will get darker with more coats, but I'm not sure more coats can help this. I'm just glad that we only bought a quart to try it out. The worst part is, our shutters don't seem to come off the house. They're anchored into the siding, so everyone who drives by gets to look at our blood shutter until I get a second to do something about it.

I'm going outside to take a picture of it, because frankly, you just have to see it...

Ok, here it is: