The Porch

It's technically a "Three Season Room" but as it was, it was a junk storage area-- that was bitterly cold in the winter and an Easy Bake Oven in summer. It was also prime real estate for spiders, because of the black walls and a ready supply of ants. So...many..ants.

The first step was to remove a lot of the rubbish that was living in there, and then primering over the black paint--the wood underneath is insanely rough--it might even be redwood, since the cabinetmaker who did a lot of the additions on the house seemed to have an endless supply of the redwood. I don't like it; I'm a pine and birch and oak person; and this stuff sucks up an incredible amount of paint--the original black oil paint has now had all the oils sink in to the wood, so the black pigment mixes annoyingly with the primer. Once the primer in on, the top coat will just be white, with the soffit the same color as the exterior of the house. Here is the primer--this stuff is good:

It goes on heavy and smooth, even on the rough wood, and doesn't have much odor. You don't want to get it on your hands though, because it's irritating and really hard to get off, so you need these:

And safety glasses for when you paint overhead. In order to discourage bugs, I bought a tube of this "Alex Fast Dry" silicone seal to run around the edges of the windows and fill cracks. Hopefully that will block drafts as well. It works so well, I need to get a couple more tubes of it to go around the outside of the house and seal up some of the other windows as well.

(No, I did not use the Redi-Whip first) :D I did also buy a good brush even though I know acrylic primer just kills brushes, especially when you have to force the paint into corners. This brush is pretty much dead and done, but it did 80% of the porch first:

I'm hoping that once the primer is on, I can switch to rollers--they put paint on much, much faster.

Progress: