The annual visit from the painting crew started on August 6th. This years task was the front of the Main Inn - the walls, columns, and porch. The first step was to take off the old cracking and peeling layers of vinyl paint from the porch.
The idea was to then cover it with a fresh smooth layer of paint, but lo and behold, the wood under that old paint was beautiful! How can one cover up such beautiful wood flooring? So the plan was changed to completely strip and sand the wood porch, and then just use a semi-transparent wood stain.
It was quite a job getting that paint off and sanding everything smooth. The painters went through over $300 in sanding disks!
But it was well worth the effort. It looks like a brand new porch!
Our porch furniture was moved under the trees outside our office windows while this project was taking place. It looks like a seating furniture convention.
The final step was to stain the porch. We choose a stain called "Sweet Rose Red". With the fresh white paint on the walls and the fresh green paint on the trim, the red stained porch really stands out. We love the new look and hope you do, too.
It is now so beautiful, that I told the painters that we might not want to let anyone walk on it again! But really it is just off limits until Monday.
While this project was going on we had more "excitement" - someone crashed into the telephone pole across the street from our inn, completely yanking off the telephone lines off of several buildings, including our inn.
The driver obviously was not paying attention to the 30 MPH speed limit - that's the speed limit sign you see flattened to the ground.
Luckily no one was hurt in the accident, but we were totally cut off from phone and internet service and the repair company was estimating that they would not be there to fix it for 2 weeks because of the Verizon strike!!! Yikes.
We immediately started putting in place an alternate plan to stay in touch and be available for the many inn guests that were checking in on the weekend. I have an iPhone with AT & T and my husband went out at got one with Verizon. So we were covered for whoever would get the best cell coverage. Then we forwarded all calls that were coming into our main inn line to the cellphones. I had to take my laptop out to the nearest free wifi spot to get our email and check for any online reservations on the first day, but then we activated our iPhone as wifi hot spots for our computers. As my husband quipped, we were now running our 4 business off of 2 iPhones. (Not quite, we also used my MacBook Pro.)
By the time we had our alternate plan in place on the second day of the "communication dead zone" (we did still have cable TV), Verizon showed up and fixed the pole and connected all the lines! Way to go Verizon guys! We definitely breathed a sigh of relief.
But we couldn't rest easy for long -- one of our septic systems was acting up. So in came the backhoe and repair crew. A couple of new pipes and new transfer tank later and everything is back to being peachy keen.
No pictures for this project. It's not quite as glamorous as the new front porch, but I'll end this post with an update on our flowering fence.
The Morning Glories are growing like crazy and the bright pink and soft blue flowers are lovely.
The deck is beautiful! I love that you just uncovered the wood and stained it! Can't wait to actually see it in person!
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