Painting

We have a lot of out buildings built out of press board, most of which were never painted before we moved in. Since the sun shine tends to be in limited supply around here, I tend to go a little overboard when I see a week with no rain in the fore cast.
This is Pop's little house that we built for him. It looks much better with a coat of paint.  It still needs some work around the edge of the roof, and then I'll be able to finish the paint job.

This is the generator shack. It also stores buckets of sand for winter cat litter.

This used to be the work shop. The garage didn't have hydro when we moved in. Now I'm using it to store farm supplies that aren't tack. Rabbit cages, water heaters, feed dishes, etc.  My second batch of chicks also started off in here.

This is my garden shed. It used to be an extension of the chicken coop. We moved it over to the garden since we weren't using it for chickens anyway.

If you're wondering why most of it is pink, it's really not that I'm a girly-girl. I'm just cheap. I'm not fussy about colour, but I am fussy about price. I watch for mistint sales all the time. Some places will sell mistints as low as $2/gallon. The town also does a paint swap every year, so I go late on the last day and pick up all the leftovers. I buy all sorts of colours, and then mix them together in 5 gallon pails. Whatever colour they turn into is the colour I paint. I do try to keep similar colours together, so everything doesn't end up brown or gray, but that's the limit. As long as it's all latex anyway. I don't like oil paint. Too much work and waste for clean up- I reuse the same rollers and paint brushes all summer, sometimes longer. I also don't think they mix as well, not to mention the smell. To be honest though, the pink was an excellent deal- $25 for a 5 gallon pail of mistint.

 We did the garage and the entrance way to the house the first summer here.  It was leftover brown from our last house.  It was kind of a mistint too.  We knew the base paint was for a dark tint, but it was really cheap, at $15 for 5 gallons.  I bought three of them, and tried to get them tinted as light as we could.  I ended up lightening the brown as we worked our way through that house, adding white after each room.  Still had about 8 gallons left when we moved here.

 The garage was actually the beginnings of a small house that the previous owner got from the guy who was building it.  He had it moved here to be a garage, but never did anything with it.  My dad and hubby put the big doors in the front of it.  Then hubby reinforced the floor. 

 There were a couple gallons of brown left afterwards, so I added all the latex paint that the previous owner had left in the basement, to create this greenish-beige.  Unfortunately 5 gallons only covered one side of the barn.  The older and more weathered press board gets, the more paint it takes to cover it.  It chips and bubbles and falls apart while you're painting.

My bedroom and living room are both painted from the same bucket of mixed mistints. The computer desk was a gallon of mistint that I had set aside.  I love the chocolate colour. 

I'm hoping to get pop's place and the barn finished next summer.  And then there's always hope that I might get the trim done all the way around the house, too.