Busy Saturday

I love living in a neighborhood. Love, love, love it.

This morning, one of the kids' friends from school came over to play. They played for a couple of hours and then we walked him home and visited with his family for half an hour or so. It's so nice.

Then, we came home and started working on ... painting Chez Gaia. Right now the house is a beige brick with beige siding on the front of the house (covered by the porch) and this green-ish brown (pond scum brown) on the eaves and soffits. I've picked out what I hope is a sage green, but it looks more like it will be a bit on the mint side.

Our hope is that by using a lighter (much lighter!) color, the attic will absorb less heat and stay just a bit cooler. Of course, for the money, we would have been better off installing radiant heat barriers. But it's already too hot to consider crawling into the "attic" space.

All we've done so far is scrub the old paint with a wire brush to roughen it up and get it ready to take the new paint. We've rinsed off the dust created by that. I suspect Mr. Gaia will work on painting while I'm napping tomorrow.

While he was getting the highest spots, I worked on the beds around our trees. I cut off the root suckers, pulled out the dead leaves and weeded out the st augustine grass (a grass that is nice in the lawn, but persistant as all get out when it's in a flower bed).