Brooke here:

As deadlines approach (and sadly, we do not have the option of listening to their delightful whooshing sound), our friend Elizabeth has signed on as a Hired Dude Extraordinaire.  She’s fairly terrifying: she works as a general contractor and within the space of five hours she had pressure-washed the entire pool deck, cleaned the Labyrinth, and started laying down paint on the deck.

It’s not a splendid new teak patio, but a patched and freshly-painted cement slab will be worlds better than the condition the pool deck was in when we bought the house.  There’s another estimate coming on the pool tomorrow, and if that comes in at a reasonable rate, we can still have that Labor Day barbecue.

I’ve been hacking away at the trees behind the pool and working to finish my office.  The fan and lights came down today and I finished the trim.  The paint job on the ceiling was going great until I looked at the painted areas and saw that bubbles had formed around the wet paint.  Spiffy.

In our old place, I had started to paint a ceiling with a roller; two passes in, a huge swath of plaster came off on the brush in a neat, tidy roll.  The problem?  No primer.  In the new house, the ceiling in the master bedroom had been primed and rolled beautifully, but there’s no trace of primer in my office.  I’m fairly certain this is my old enemy, oil-based paint, as the plaster is stable and only a thin coat of white ceiling paint has peeled off.  Oh, and the surface under the white paint looks to be bright pink.

Since most of the ceiling doesn’t look too bad, I’m going to try spot treatment with the sand-spackle-sand strategy first.  If that doesn’t work, then I’ll scrape the entire ceiling, sand it, prime it, and paint it (please work, mister spackle, pretty  please…).