Painting, demolition

We've got some people painting our house, because the guy we hired to fix some caulking and flashing up there told us this was pretty much the last year before the current paint job started peeling. And also Ruth's always wanted a purple house.

(I eventually wanted a purple house; naturally there was a saga about paint colors first. I, having seen some nasty-looking purple houses in my time, was initially skeptical. So I said I'd go for it if she could point out an existing house with the exact purple she wanted and got me to agree that it looked good, so we could match that color and skip the whole mindgame hell where it's impossible to imagine what a 3x4" paint chip will look like covering a whole wall. She'd actually found the house she was looking for years ago and lost it, but eventually RE-found it up on N. Skidmore. [We think. The timeline on the paint job doesn't quite match up, but if that's not the same house then we have no idea what the hell happened with the original.] I sent them a card in the mail asking them to text us about paint. This totally worked.)

Anyway, they're out there painting today. But before they could paint, we needed to tear down this pergola thing, which was... I don't even know how to explain what a baffling position it was in, it would take like half an hour and a bunch of speculation about what our lot was used for before it was subdivided, but, just take my word for it, it was completely outrageous.

INTERLUDE: What is a pergola?

Well, it's this motherfucker.

So on Monday we borrowed the neighbor's sawzall (thanks Jim 😭🙏🏼), chopped through the 4x4s, and then spent the entire evening — lo, even unto the dark of night, past last call at the local brewpub so we couldn't even let someone else handle the victory dinner and beer — taking out bolts and cutting through countersunk wood screws to separate the legs from the top.

Anyway, we triumphed. We were concerned we were gonna be stuck with it once it was down, but I put a freebie post on Craigslist and someone came and put it in a damn minivan two hours later. Amazing.

EXTERIOR OF HOUSE, WITH SHOUTED SPEECH BUBBLE EXTENDING FROM INTERIOR:

Successful demolition project, Dracula!!!