Haint Blue!

Rain, Rain, Go Away / We have to paint the porch today!

That’s been our refrain for… weeks. It really does seem that if we get a day off to paint, the rain just comes on in. But this weekend, even with Alberto on the way, we did get a couple of days to work on the front porch. We are starting from the top and coming down, so that means we got to dive into our haint blue paint!

In case you’re new to the blog… We have decided to go with tradition and paint the ceilings of both porches haint blue. I’m sure you’ve seen antebellum houses all over the South with blue ceilings. As the legend goes, a blue ceiling would keep away haints… and bugs! Evidently the bugs were supposed to be fooled into thinking the blue was the sky and move along. We haven’t seen any haints, but we have a few bugs who love our porches, so I’ll have to report back later to let you know how it goes! For more on this haint blue story, check out this article: https://www.sherwin-williams.com/architects-specifiers-designers/inspiration/styles-and-techniques/sw-article-pro-thewhysbehind

Of course, the first thing we had to do is get the ceiling coated in Kilz. The word “Kilz’d” is now a normal term in our house, as in, “Has the porch been Kilz’d yet?” or “I’ve got to get this wall Kilz’d before you can paint.” Here are a couple of pics of the Kilz’d porch ceiling:

Then we whipped out the haint blue – Sherwin Williams Atmospheric. Doesn’t that just sound fabulous?

In process:

Pro tip: if you’re working on a porch ceiling and you’re up on a ladder, keep a piece of painter’s tape on your ladder for bug grabbing. You can probably see the dead bug bodies on my tape there at the top of the ladder. Works like a charm! (That’s for Maria who always wants the gory details!)

Ceiling is finished on the front porch:

We’re working from top down, so there’s still much to do. I guess we’ll wait out Alberto and see if we can get a couple of clear days in the near future!

In other news around Casablanca, I finally finished the Starlight Quilt. This quilt is enormous and is a scrappy traditional Log Cabin quilt. Most of the fabrics were chosen because the patterns had meaning for us – there’s an Army print to honor Eric’s service, bicycles to remind us of riding at the beach on our anniversary trip, maple leaves for our camping trips, spools of thread for quilting, turtles as a reminder of the turtle farm we visited in Cayman on our honeymoon. And the star pattern is for Starlight Drive – where I was living when God brought Eric to my doorstep. It’s where we fell in love and started our life together. It’s where we were when we first started dreaming out loud about Casablanca.

The Starlight Quilt has been Lucy approved:

And then I got started right away on a Thank You quilt for Mom. When we moved into her house we said, “I’m sure it will only be for 2 or 3 months.” We finally moved out after 14 months, so bless her heart! She definitely deserves this blue and white log cabin…

More porch pics to come soon, I hope! Thanks, Friends!