OK, I consider this art because I did it all myself and put a lot of work into it -- at the very least it's a craft project. I've had no weekends to myself for the past 8 weeks, and some of this stretched into weekday mornings and weeknights too.

The people who sold our house to us must have hired one of those teams that goes through and just slaps a coat of paint on everything as quickly as they can, because this paint was cracked and peeling all the way down to the wood. They painted over the metal house numbers, and they got paint on the doorbell button (it would have taken them 5 extra minutes to take the thing off to paint behind it). Anyway, the whole house isn't painted, thank goodness. Most of it's gray vinyl siding. But the part that's painted wood was looking pretty awful. This is the section to the left of the door -- before, during, and after (today).

I used a heat gun to soften the old paint and scrape it off -- a long, hot, laborious process, but at least there were no toxic chemicals. I did check using a testing kit to make sure there wasn't any lead-based paint. Then I proceeded to take all the paint off, down to the wood. What I couldn't scrape off I tried to sand off, and what didn't sand off was thin, flat and well-attached enough that painting over it made no difference.

This is "board-and-batten" siding, with a sheet of flat wood laid down over the house's studs, then vertical slats ("battens" -- when they say "batten down the hatches" on a ship during a storm, they mean to nail wooden slats over them). I really didn't want to go into taking the wood completely off and redoing the siding entirely. Besides, the wood didn't look bad once I'd gotten that awful old paint off.

The process was:

1. Remove hardware, if any (lights, doorbell button, numbers, flag brackets)
2. Strip the paint with the heat gun and a scraper (each section took hours)
3. Sand the wood (took time too)
4. Clean the wood to get rid of paint bits, sawdust and dirt (then let it dry)
5. Fill in any holes, cracks, etc. with spackle and fill in gaps with caulk (then let it dry)
6. Protect things I didn't want paint on with masking tape
7. Paint on a coat of primer
8. Repeat that until all sections have primer
9. Put another coat of primer on everything (then let it dry)
10. Put a coat of paint on everything (then let it dry)
11. Put a second coat of paint on everything (then let it dry)
12. Put hardware back on (or new hardware in some cases)

Yes, I painted it purple -- a very light purple that Valspar calls "Sassy Lilac." More pictures coming.

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