why must it be boring?

I'm not surprised to learn that a purple house has sub-optimal saleability. But why must the new paint job be white, with black trim? BORING. My house in Ithaca was painted thus when I bought it ... and it had cream siding. Bleah. My house here has a brick facade up to the windows. Bleah bleah bleah.

I've been fortunate because the guy who did my exterior paint job last spring is available and will be repainting the exterior as soon as the weather is cooperative ... which is likely to be this week.

Funny story about getting in touch with him. I had him in my cell phone's "contacts" but once the painting was done, I deleted his info -- I figured it would be such a long time before I needed an exterior paint job, there was no point. Well, I couldn't even remember his last name. I originally had hired him as an employee of another painting guy, but I knew he was going to set up his own business. I did a web search - no luck. Then I remembered that I had worked with Mike directly to paint the back door I had installed in late summer. I thought of looking through my duplicate check stubs ... but had I already packed them? Luckily, they weren't packed yet and I found his last name.

More web searching: no luck. Sigh.

Then I remembered I should have his number in my cell phone records. I hadn't packed those yet, either. Found the bill for the time period when I wrote the check. But I had to pour over that bill, looking for numbers that were in the correct week that had both incoming and outgoing calls. And then I had three or so candidate numbers. The first one I dialed was a friend of mine. The second was the landscaping guy. The third was a completely impersonal voicemail. My message ran something like "Hi. I'm looking for Mike. If this isn't Mike's number, you can ignor this message. If this is Mike, hi, it's Naomi and I would like to talk to you about painting my house."

He called back within the hour.