Bringing in the reinforcments to paint outside

You might remember my post from March when we tore down the vines on our storage buildings. After all the vines were gone, the wall was in pretty bad shape. It’s been shedding salt and just starting to crumble off due to improper care and the wrong materials being used on it in the first place. So our neighbor the general contractor came over and put a netting on the wall, added new plaster and got it looking fresh again.

Unfortunately, the wall was left looking white and bare for the last few months because the plaster used had no color. We’ve been looking for the time to paint it for a couple months now but just never seemed to find it. But thankfully Stefan’s parents agreed to take care of the problem for us while they were here last week.

Once again I am astounded by the impact a little paint makes. The storage buildings finally look like they are part of the farm again. We’ve decided that when we rebuild the shutters on the front of the main house we’re going to build some for the windows in this building too. Then it will really become one continuous ground of buildings that are all uniformly painted and decorated.

But the painted wasn’t just on the storage buildings – the guest house got a bit of love too. It was also repaired by our neighbor a long while back but it’s not exactly an easy area to reach. The wooden ladder was used to get on and off of the big extension ladder which was actually resting down in the stink hole  which used to be a compost heap. There’s nasty, smelly green water in there so it’s a very good thing that Kurt had sure footing because fishing him out of there would not have been pleasant.

Doesn’t it look fantastic?! I’m so glad they were willing to spend 7 hours doing this for us. I swear I don’t know when it would have gotten done otherwise. And while they were working, I was inside cooking like a fiend. We compensated them for all their hard work with slabs of ribs, coleslaw, baked beans, smoked corn on the cob and sweet potatoes. It was a bit of a dry run for the Lantern festival since I’m planning to use a bunch of new recipes.

So now we just have one more cleaning session in store with Nico next week to tidy up in front of the house, I need to plant the flowers I bought on Monday, we need to build the table for the harvest kitchen this weekend…and then we’ll be ready to party. It’s going to be great!