After months of house-painting indecision (do it ourselves/do it ourselves with help from friends/hire a professional housepainter), we opted for the pro. It was a costly decision, but the right one. After watching the paint crew at work, we now realize just how much is involved in painting a house, and in particular, painting a house well. The painters worked for five days, Monday through Friday. It would have taken us a month just to do the prep work, never mind the painting.
A couple of related items:
While scooping up dog poop this morning, I noticed our grass was dry. The automatic sprinkler system wasn’t working. Now, I’ve reprogrammed and adjusted the sprinkler control so many times, I know it cold – no owner’s manual for me. I’m proud to say it took me only 30 minutes to discover the painters had unplugged the control panel.
Fearing that if I left the motorcycle in the garage, paint spray would get through the seams of the door and onto the bike, I rode to work all week. At some point I’ll have to calculate the difference in cost between driving the truck and riding the bike. The daily round trip is just over 40 miles; the truck gets 14 to 15 mpg and the bike gets 44 mpg. Certainly the numbers will argue in favor of the bike. Ah, but . . . a person in a truck is harder to kill than a person on a motorcycle. So until the rest of you start riding to work, that “but” will continue to outweigh the cost of gas, and I’ll confine my riding to weekends.