Painting around the rain and yellow jackets

Today I put on R's bee keeping outfit and painted some of the remaining grey painted area.  I had to stop several times because I was wearing flip flops and only one glove......kind like Michael Jackson. The last thing that I wanted was a bee sting on my foot or my right hand.

I no sooner finished painting the grey area around the window area than it started to spritz.  I didn't want to chance priming the peak area and then have it rain buckets and wash the white paint all down the front of the dining room and onto the roof of the bay window so I called it quits on the painting. But I did get the last small shutter and the last storm window painted first.

Tomorrow I can pick up the storm window hangers and I'll spray paint them right away just in case the rain let's up later on in the day but the forecast doesn't look good.  I would really like to get the two storm windows installed tomorrow so that we can concentrate on the peak and the two small shutters for the small window.

Years ago I purchased several lots of vintage shutter dogs.  They were in so so condition but the beauty of buying objects made out of metal is that they can be fixed.  The first thing that I did was to disassemble them.  There was the shutter dog, a large square head screw, a washer, and a cotter key.

I tossed all the cotter keys because most were broke and cotter keys are inexpensive.  The washers and screws were sand blasted but the dogs themselves needed more than sandblasting.  All of them were bent to various degrees but I found the easiest method for making them flat again was to place them in a large vise and close the vise.  But before I squeezed I placed a board on each side of the dog to keep it from getting those little dents that some vises have on their jaws.  Once they were reasonably flat, they were also sand blasted.  All the parts were primed and then stored in a large Zip Loc baggie until yesterday when I brought them out and spray painted them.

Now I have to decide whether we want to place the shutter dog on the bottom or the middle of the side. R thinks the side because he says it brings some of the black to the large area of white.  I agree but I would prefer the bottom corner because I really would like to had a large ring pull to the outside edge of the shutter because authentic working shutters would need something to grab a hold of to close the shutter.  My problem is finding large enough ring pulls in a large quantity.

In the mean time, we are looking forward to rebuilding the door casing around the front door, painting the front door white. and reinstalling  the original wrought iron straps, door knocker, and door handles.