Sorry for the blogging hiatus. It is time to get back to it. We have a lot of exciting stuff to share about, and I know at least a few of you out there that want to be shared with 🙂 Thank you for your emotional support (whether it is real or only perceived). This one (and hopefully the several ones after this one) is for you!
I’d like to take this post to catch you up on some of the progress we have made on the store, particularly in this past fall and the early part of the winter. For those of you who drive by from time to time, you may well have noticed. We put up the large majority of the boards for the board and batten that is going up on the outside of the house.
The idea was to give the store a farm feel, and we thought that the rough cut wood painted red would emanate the essence of barn. So we measured up the whole exterior and ordered a lot of rough cut lumber. It was dropped off into a few big piles in the yard, and the cutting and painting began.
Painting rough cut boards by hand does not go quickly. In fact, it goes anti-quickly. Grandpa, in his zeal to see the store completed, volunteered himself to paint for us. Did we ever take him up on that! I had boards ready to go for him just about every day, and the old man kept plodding along. I painted whenever I could, and between the two of us, we slowly crept forward with progress. Every once and a while I would nail up the completed boards to give us hope that, somehow, we would beat old man winter to the punch.
Dad decided to take matters into his own hands partway through the process, and he did so by purchasing a paint sprayer. I am very pleased with whoever it was that invented the paint sprayer. They saved me a lot of time and will continue to do so every time we have to paint or stain one of our barns. However, we only had a day or two of good weather left by the time we got it, and what we could not finish with the paint sprayer in that time, we hauled down to the basement. Down in that dungeon, I painted the rest of them by hand. To give you an idea of the time I put in down there, I completed a lecture series on the history of the church while I was painting. Seriously, if anybody ever wants to talk church history with me, I would be more excited than most normal humans to engage in that discourse.
The next non-terrible weather day that I had free, all the completed boards went up. This upcoming summer, we are planning on doing the battens and finishing the peaks of the roofs, but for now, the store is covered, and it is looking more and more like a farm store.
Hey guys, looks great!!