The house in her birthday suit.

We started getting painting bids in mid august which is basically the height of the painting season here in Portland. All the painters that were highly recommended had more work than they could shake a stick at and were therefore passing along astronomical bids to paint our house. In addition, new EPA regulations state that house built before 1975 are assumed to be painted with lead base paint and there for extra precautions must be taken by the painter which again means more cost to us. We seemed to uncover a very expensive problem when we removed the vinyl siding. The north and east elevations, the ones with less direct sun and predominant weather where actually in good shape, there are a few minor touch ups but the bulk of the prep work was going to be in filling the nail and staple holes left from the vinyl siding. However, the west and the south elevations as well as the entire garage were in horrible shape. The paint was failing as it was delaminating from the wood. Zanna brother in law Alex Smith God bless him! Sent us a tool he had used to strip his own house when he recently painted. The tool, the paint shaver pro is basically a Makita grinder with an after market head attachment the turns the grinder into a portable planner made for siding. It has three carbide blades that removed paint from both the face as well as the under side of the clabbers. The tool has a built in dust extraction port and when hooked up to my HEPA vacuum meets the new EPA guidelines for controlled removal of lead based paint. The tool is amazing and is able to strip the siding of paint back to the bare wood. We focused on our problem areas the South and West elevations as well as the garage. It was a lot of work but was really satisfying to see the wood be brought back into shape. I further nailed off the loose siding and repaired or replaced the ones that were truly un repairable. Check out our progress. We were able to lower our paint bids by about 5000$ by doing this portion of prep work. This has brought the painting below our original budget which means we were able to hire a painter and hope to have the house painted in the coming weeks.