Painting the Garage Eaves

Ding dong the witch is dead. And by witch I mean garage eaves. And by dead I mean painted white. See where I'm going with this?

 In the picture below, you can see how bad the eaves were. Lots of exposed wood and chipping paint. The overhang on this side is actually wrapped in metal flashing, so that's why it looks so nice. And then the corner post there was recently painted when Chris and my dad installed our new garage door. So my goal was to make everything look like those portions.

 And boy did I ever have my work cut out for me ...

When I was finished, it definitely looked a lot better. I even washed the metal flashing so it would be bright white like the painted parts. If I was really going for style and weatherproof points, I would go around and caulk in all those gaps. But, honestly, this garage is kind of a piece of shit, so let's not go overboard. Perfection + old house = not gonna happen.

Moving along to the sides, the chipping was even worse. And I had the added joy of scraping and painting those rafters every two feet. Although actually, it was nice to gauge my progress by them. "Ok Callie, you've painted the first four rafter sections, and you've only got six to go. Six more and you can finally get off this later and take a shower. And if you paint two more, you can go inside and sit in the air conditioning for a few minutes." haha I love taking these in bite-size chunks.

 Here's a good shot of my process. The section on the right has been scraped and painted, the middle section has only been scraped, and the right section hasn't been touched yet. It's sort of discouraging to make it look worse before you make it look better, but it's a crucial step if you don't want the paint to peel right away.

 Also, that band at the top is metal. So it probably didn't need to be painted for the sake of weatherproofing, but it was a little rusty/dirty in spots, so I decided to just go over everything to give it a nice clean look.

As always, I've renamed these photos as I've uploaded them to our server. I usually just pick a short word for the whole post of pictures and then number them. Incidentally, this photo is named "eaves6". I got a kick out of that. Maybe it's just me ...

Almost done! Can you see that one rafter near the end that was painted yellow? How random is that? The last painter must have gotten confused. Oh, yeah, and I still need to do something about that rusty hanger there ...

 All finished!

Here's what the back looked like before my paint makeover. Pretty rough, huh? I especially liked that piece of rusted metal that was used to cover up a tiny hole and was now more of an eyesore than whatever it had intended to mask.

You can see in the picture below that the entire piece of overhang trim was just bare exposed wood. No need to scrape that baby. It was ready to go.

Love this shot. You can really see what a difference the paint makes visually. And obviously it's helping protect everything too.

Sadly, on the front and back, my little step stool just didn't cut it. So I had to break out the big ladder and use my step stool as a table to hold my paint.

This is the point where I ran out of paint. Yeah, so close to being done. Last side, last section. Oh, and did I mention I was sitting on the shed roof? The space was so narrow that my ladder was almost vertical, so I had to balance on the shed to keep from falling. Let's just say running out of paint did not improve my happiness.

But after a quick trip to Lowe's where everyone stared and laughed at me (had paint splatters on my face, hands, clothes ... pretty much everywhere) I had the rest of the paint I needed. And about 45 minutes later, we had this.

Cue the angels singing. Ok, I know it's still a shitty garage, but just let me have this one moment, will you? haha

But at least the white trim matches the house now. So that's something, right?

The sort of crappy part is that from the angle where we see the garage the most - looking out from the back steps - it doesn't look different at all. haha

Oh well. It wasn't one of my most favorite projects to DIY, but I definitely was able to save us some money instead of hiring a professional paint contractor. And hopefully this will help extend the life of that wood a little longer and no one who stumbles into our backyard will think this is an abandoned building. lol