Outside paintwork

I have been saying over and over again that when the weather improved a bit, I needed to get outside and do the outdoors paintwork.  So it now has, and today I tackled some of it.

We have a back gate which opens into a lane beyond the house – we never use it although couriers occasionally use it as a dumping ground for parcels they can’t be bothered to bring up the drive. It was looking very battered and part of it was decayed, so I scraped the bad bits out and painted the underlying wood with hardening solution.  J gave the whole thing a coat of primer paint, and tomorrow I will fill the residual holes in with wood filler.

I also started on the side garage door.  I washed it down, primed it and nailed a new strip of wood along the bottom.  The nail gun I got for Christmas came in useful for this – however I have a story of my own stupidity to tell about it.  A few days ago I was trying it out for the first time, and as per standard procedure, I took a piece of waste wood, clamped it on to my workbench and fired off some shots.  It has a control to adjust the depth the nail goes into, so playing with it up and down I put about 10 nails into the waste wood.  “You know that you are nailing that wood to the bench?” J pointed out.  I didn’t know, but I was.  He kindly pulled the nails out for me – then rather less kindly disappeared and did not help with the rest of the work.  Men.

But anyway – the doors are looking much better – I just have the filling and the topcoats to do tomorrow.