Carrick Eriskay : Painting the East Wing : First around windows and doors and thin areas

Carrick Eriskay : Painting the East Wing : Last – remove the downpipes and paint the boards behind them

The iconic blue paint on the larch cladding is nearly 12 years old and still looking good – from a distance, at least.  It doesn’t flake, but wears away – and fades – slowly, with areas with less thickness (or taking more of a battering from the weather) looking thin first.  It’s a very, very expensive paint (strictly, an opaque micro-porous wood stain) from Finland  – where they know a thing or two about wooden houses.  Being an eco-friendly paint, it’s water-based, and requires reliably dry conditions : we don’t get those until the letting season underway, making it difficult to schedule.

Funnily enough (well, not funny at all), the Coronavirus shut-down in April and May has provided us with the perfect conditions to get both the East Wing and Cross-Wing done : both the light blue vertical boards and the dark blue eaves.  We had just enough paint still in stock – left over from the original painting, in fact – to complete this work ; which is a relief, because, with no income coming in, it would have been difficult to justify spending £300 plus perhaps £15-£20 p+p for a 10 litre tin!

We painted the West Wing three years ago – it’s more exposed and deteriorates quicker.  In future, however, we want to have to paint only a small section of the whole house in any one year, so we will paint one ‘section’ (defined by corners) each year – which will be easier to fit in where there’s an odd day vacant between lettings in spring or summer.