Exterior Refinish - The Actual Finish

It has been so, so long since I wrote anything in this blog it would be reasonable to assume it was done (or done for).  

Not really – I had got off track, as I have been known to do from time to time, so here it is again.

The summer of 2019 was fully consumed with the exterior refinish of our cottage.  

How could this possibly be one might ask – and we asked ourselves this regularly.

Looks like it needs some TLC

To put the extent of this project in perspective we put a down payment in late 2016 for work to be done in 2017.  2016 was a poor weather year and luckily 2017 was lovely.  

Lucky for us we thought.  

However the folks who were to have their homes done in 2016 got their work pushed to 2017, so no go for us.  We did however get a delivery of some scaffolding (progress?).  

The scaffolding was still there in 2019.....

(if we could have found ANYONE else who would sand the building like we wanted we may have asked for our deposit back - but since they seemed to be the only game in town we crossed our fingers and waited)

The scaffolding - which at least proved to us they would be back sometime

FINALLY – the work was done in 2019.  What we had not known was that the company was made up of 2 people who were married and during the time frame of our project their marriage fell apart.  This resulted in all sorts of complications such as one no longer being carried on the others benefits and now needing to get alternate full time employment, which reduced potential working hours to weekends and vacations.  Additionally – our job turned out to be more difficult than they expected.  Not our fault – we had them out to see before giving us a price.

The bulk of the work was the sanding of all the exterior surfaces of the cottage.  It is not a huge place, but that is still an awful lot of square footage.  And, of course, it cannot be done in the rain.  And, of course, the guy who was doing it was now working elsewhere during the week.  And, of course, if the sanding is going on nothing else really can happen – it is dirty and noisy work.  The net result was that every weekend we had to be prepared to have the work be done.  So – 2019 was a sunny year with almost no ability to have people visit. Rats.

Ours is an old/new cottage rebuilt in a new location and various parts needed repair.

Such as the corners ..... (done before we engaged the sanders).

Additionally, we needed to replace some wood around the windows.

Plus - it had been stained in the past with things attached to the walls in some cases, which as it was reassembled, took on a certain special something.  All this mis-matched mess gets removed during the sanding.

Clearly not reassembled the way it had been built originally

Roger, our sanding guy, did the work with basic electrical tools.  Apparently he loves to sand, which is a good thing.  
On some days we could hear him singing along with whatever music was playing through his ear protectors.

Our man Roger

The differences before and after the sanding were astonishing, and quite exciting.  
The variation in the wood colours (red cedar from BC) were pretty dramatic in some places, particularly on the sides that faced more weather.  

By the end Roger had gotten a bit fed up with the whole thing (as were we) and left the finishing to his ex who completed the sanding and did the staining.

We are quite thrilled with the result and now the outside basically matches the inside.

Hurray !  

Isn't it pretty !