A little help from my friends

It's Sunday evening and I'm wiped out.  I probably won't finish this blog entry before going to bed but I thought I'd start it now so I'll remember tomorrow what I wanted to write about.  Maybe posting this picture will remind me.

James and I have been working on scraping, replacing panes, reglazing and painting the upstairs windows.  A friend helped me with the downstairs ones and that motivated me to finish.  The upstairs windows created a whole new challenge.  The height and slanted roof made this job more intimidating.  First I tried hiring 3 different people.  One guy said he'd do it for a very hefty sum.  The second guy said no thank you and the third guy never showed up after I told him he was hired.  That's why you see me in this bucket loader.

I've told you many times how nice our neighbors are and once again one of them showed me how lucky we are to have such generous friends.  Fred is an electrician and owns this handy bucket loader which reaches 4 of the 6 windows and makes being up that high less scary.  It's very cool.  He went on vacation this week and let us use it while he was gone.  Five days isn't long enough to finish the job but it's a good start.

I called our roofer to see if he had any ideas for how we could reach the 2 center windows.  He explained to me how C-clamps, plywood and 2X4's should do the trick and then asked if we'd like some of his roofers to help.   I said yes.  He was going to ask them today if they were interested but I haven't heard back.  I really hope they are because I'm really getting tired of working on these windows. 

While I get to ride in the bucket loader James (who is afraid of heights)  has been standing on the roof doing the scraping.  I don't know how he's doing it.  Our roof is copper and can be very slippery.  There's no way I'd be doing this without his help.