Porch Purge - September 11, 2021

 O.M.G.  

The Husband and I worked ourselves like two rented mules yesterday.  My bad knee is all swollen, and my feet feel like somebody's been hitting them with a hammer.

It's all because of that gallon of paint I bought.

About mid-morning, I was on the porch, fooling with one of Roger's projects, when The Husband came out.  I could tell he had something on his mind.  It turned out that he was thinking about that gallon of paint, planning the mission.

I believe his original plan was just to scrub the boards on the outside of the porch, to prepare them for painting the next day.  We mixed up buckets of water, cleaner, and bleach and went to work with scrub brushes.  (We own a power washer, but The Husband was afraid the high pressure would ruin the screens, hence the scrub brushes.)  When the outside was scrubbed, we moved all the furniture to the middle of the porch and tackled the inside walls.  I could not believe how filthy they were.  To make them suitable for painting, I had to scrub the corners with a toothbrush.  And the floor was even filthier than I had imagined.

It took us about 3 hours to scrub the boards, inside and out.  I still had a good bit of energy left, and so I said, "Let's move the furniture out in the yard and do the floor."

The Husband rigged up the power washer, and we went at it.  About halfway through, the water hose had a blow-out.  I went in search of a new one.  

When the porch was finally clean, we started on the furniture.  Every chair and table had spider-egg sacks under the bottom.  Every cushion was coated with dust.  We power-washed everything.  The rug had soaked up nasty water from the wall-washing, so we unrolled it on the driveway and power-washed it, too.

Finally, about 6:30 p.m., we quit.  We were both so achy and tired that we could barely move.  

I guess we'll paint today.  The floor needs to be water-sealed, but we sprayed so much water on it that it probably needs a week to dry, so I'm not even going to think about the floor today.  

Once the painting is done, I'm going to have a throwing-away party.  The porch has become a catch-all for everything we don't know where to put.  The garbage collectors are going to hate me on garbage day.