September 28th 2026

I wasn’t looking to redo the entire portico when I accidentally busted the handrail.

I had figured that some new mums and a little bit of mulch would do the trick.

Which in hindsight is pretty funny to assume that six mums and three bags of mulch would hide 30+ years of neglect… peeling paint, rotting wood, rust, a busted up looking builder’s grade door.

Sure.

Mums will totally fix that.

Not only did they not fix it… they made the problems that much more apparent.

They drew attention to the problem.

It was like putting a $1000 custom Italian suit on a guy who hadn’t washed or gotten a haircut in years. I mean… they were really pretty mums… so the analogy here fits ok? Just go with it.

My point being here that the church’s southern entrance looked far worse after a bit of care than it had looked when it was full on neglect.

Nobody pays much attention to an unwashed man. People take notice, people have questions though when there’s an unwashed man in a $1000 suit.

I had my thoughts about the ancient paint job. Despite being an artist I’m not nearly as versed in house paints as one might assume, but I do know enough, after having owned two homes in the last fifteen years, what a really old paint job looks like.

One of the first things I began to notice with our first home was that the paint, after a few years in the unrelenting St Pete sun started to get chalky. Don’t ask me how but somehow the sun manages to strip the satin finish right out of the paint. That’s far above my house painting pay-grade know-how.

But it happens and in sunny St Pete it took almost a decade to get there.

The church’s paint was not only chalky, but the color was I’d have to assume, nothing like what it had once been. The paint resembled more of a patina than it did a uniform coat of color. Large strips were missing or nearly missing. There were sections of rot, spots of moldy mildew, wood that buckled and had cracked.

My guess was that if it took ten years in Florida for the sun to annihilate the paint, that in contrast this probably took at least twice as long to get that bad. In my experience if cold weather and rain were the bosses that paint had to beat at the end of each game level, sun was the final boss at the end of the entire game… the one that had you rage quitting and tossing your controller across the room. You just weren’t going to win. The sun ALWAYS won.

Sun also isn’t nearly as prevalent here as it is in well… the sunshine state. If I had to guess, I’d say that never once in the marketing campaign to nickname the great state of NY did ‘the sunshine state,’ ever come up for consideration. And if it had, that guy was either mocked mercillessly or fired on the spot. “FINE!” He’d scream as he was being dragged out by security… “THE EMPIRE STATE! THE EMPIRE STATE! COME ON GUYS… I REALLY NEED THIS FUCKING JOB RIGHT NOW.”

Which brings us back to the trashed looking portico and the god awful chalky, peeling paint… if it took that long to get that bad in upstate NY, and it took a decade for my paint to look like absolute shit on the southwest facing corner of my Florida home, I guessed that the church’s paint had to be at at least 20 years old. Though I had a sneaking suspicion that it was far older than that.

One of my neighbors, the mayor’s wife actually confirmed my suspicions when I was out there finishing up the primer with David. She was driving by… headed to Wegman’s to buy their rotisserie chicken when she stopped to commend us on the paint job.

“Primer… it’s just the primer… we haven’t even gotten to the paint.”

“Well it looks so much better already…”

Which personally I think speaks volumes on the portico’s state if a coat of splotchy white primer looks ‘so much better already,’ than what was there and it did.

So I asked her, “Hey I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s been a long time since this was painted… you have lived here what? Twenty four years you said?”

“Yes…”

“Ok… in that 24 years you’ve been here, have you ever seen this church painted.”

There was zero hesitation.

“No. Never.”

“I thought so.”

Another neighbor was able to get my paint estimate even further back.

“You two are always working,” that was always his standard greeting. He’s a nice guy, quiet. Kind of reminds me of Wilson from Home Improvement. Seeing just the top of him over the fence on most days probably cemented more of that comparison than anything else. He never gave wholesome advice to me over the fence, unless you counted, “Looks like a lot of work,” as some sort of advice. More of a warning, really.

But he was out there the next day. He had a question about a breaker in his garage tripping. Now that his kids were grown and out of the house, he was restoring an old sports car from the 1970s. He asked David about his breaker and David told him he’d take a look at it over the weekend. Before he could head back inside though I had to ask him, “Quick question for you… you’ve lived here a while right?”

“Nearly 30 years now…”

“You ever see this place painted?”

“Never.”

No hesitation there either.

Which then led me to believe that the place probably hadn’t been painted since at least the 70s. I say that because the church was no longer a church in the early 80s. Probably de-churched if you will, right around the time I was born and if there’s one thing I know about the church, I know that the church doesn’t like to be separated from its money… especially a church with a dwindling congregation. Facts.

So the idea that this place would have been painted by an ever shrinking congregation right before going belly up seemed pretty unlikely.

Here we were painting something that very well may not have been painted since bee-hive hairstyles and horn rimmed glasses were in vogue… and the mums had made it all the more apparent. Don’t get me wrong, they looked great. By proxy though everything else therefore looked like shit.

In theory this was going to be a quick little project. Little bit-o scraping, little bit-o caulking… little bit-o painting.

I tried to circumvent the whole priming thing too. Except that after calling ‘my older brother’ who has painted homes for longer than I’ve been alive told me that I really shouldn’t do that. “If the paint is chalky looking it’s probably water based… but I’m not there to tell you 100% so it could be oil. If it’s oil and you don’t prime you’re just wasting your time. That new paint job will just peel right off in sheets… oil and water don’t mix…”

You knew that was coming. So fine… add in a bit-o priming right before the painting… and we’d be good.

Except that once you started priming you started noticing all the other shit that the portico had going on. And there was a LOT of other shit.

Rust, so much rust. Rot… lots and lots of rot. Gaps in wood that had to be filled. New wood that had to get cut to replace the rot. More caulking. There was so much to do.

Fucking mums.

Then there was this whole little strip of portico that went out over a hill. Which then turned into David getting roped into the whole updo because you weren’t comfortable on a grassy knoll trying to reach a portico’s side that sat nearly ten feet off the ground. For that David walked to his wood shed and came back with various off cuttings of plywood and 1x6s and 2x4s until he put together something that looked even more dangerous than the ladder on the grass hill. While he sucks as a painter, and he’d have no problem telling you that himself, he’s a star on a precariously placed ladder which was in this case, more than qualified. I sure as shit was not getting on the wood stacked ladder hill. If there was one thing I know about grassy knolls it was that they had a way of going from completely innocuous to deadly in no time and you weren’t fucking with that. That’s an assassination reference.

Never mind.

Now once the busted looking rusty door was primed, old wood was caulked, and rotting wood was replaced the mum effect really began to take hold. Not only did the portico look like shit… well less shitty after the primer… but the whole retaining wall and stairs down into the portico really became even more of an eyesore. The retaining wall had cracked where the portico’s metal columns attached. The crack had lowered the height of the wall and as a result, years… probably decades of water had made its way down the stairs along the retaining wall, cracking the cement steps and leaving a thick and unsightly gap along the wall.

“We’re going to stucco the wall.”

“Huh?”

“The retaining wall under the portico. Looks like shit. We’re going to stucco it.”

“I thought you just needed me to prime that one spot that you couldn’t get to.”

“Plans changed. Gotta go with the flow…”

“My flow is cleaning out the sanctuary…”

“I’ll flow with you up there after. Right now it’s the portico.”

Which is how David got roped into the stucco. The plan was that he was going to mix the stucco in little batches. I had never stucco’d a retaining wall. I had no clue what the working time was for the material. I also didn’t know how well I was going to man a 60lb bag of the shit. So I told him that I’d stucco… he’d mix… and we’d have this wrapped up in no time.

I guess I was taking too long though because David wound up jumping in there and applying the stucco. And again… this man is amazing at so many things. A-MAZE-ING. You know what he sucks at though? Painting, Priming, and… stucco.

I kept trying to coach him on his stucco application… I was really struggling to find the right words, “My god you suck at this…” kept coming to mind, “Wow I’m a lot better at this than you are…” wasn’t that much better. How was I going to break it to him that he was far better at picking up the bag and mixing the mortar than he was at putting this shit on?

I pondered that for a bit while I bit my tongue and watched as he did his best to apply paper thin and gritty coats of stucco to the wall. With each pass of the trowel he’d remove more chunks of the material he’d just mixed up. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore, “Hey you’re doing a great job… I don’t want you to think that you’re not (he wasn’t) doing a great job or that I don’t appreciate your help… I do… but… with this one big wall it definitely looks like two different people are working on the wall…”

“Because two different people are working on the wall…”

“Right… but I want it to look like ONE person was working on the wall… and I kind of want to be that one person so…”

“Say no more… I’ll get dinner started.”

Which wasn’t exactly what you were hoping for… you still had another 60lb bag to heft and mix, but upon inspecting David’s stucco work again, you decided that the heft would be worth him turning in his trowel.

Best of all. No feelings were hurt and the stucco came out looking like one person (who was surprisingly good at stucco for a first time go around) had done the wall.

Where David sucked at stucco he excelled at cutting and measuring wood. A true knack, really. You went to shop class with a wood teacher who was missing three fingers and that was some trauma you still carried. You weren’t exactly one with the power tools, especially the ones that had giant blades larger than your head. David therefore cut sections of wood and primed them and put them in place on the portico’s utility closet.

You wouldn’t let him touch the caulk.

He didn’t seem to give a fuck.

It wasn’t until he was helping you paint the portico that he started to get annoyed with your micro-managing. You were doing your best to keep him in his lane… cutting, mixing, measuring… painting large areas that weren’t exactly fuck-up-able when he took it upon himself to cut in around the celestial ceiling you had been working on. In fairness to him you had told him that you wanted to add a wooden trim piece about 1” x 2” around the ceiling and the sides, so that the paint didn’t have to be perfect there… and he ran with that.

When he smashed the roller into the ceiling and left a massive splotch on your paintwork you blurted out something about him not touching any of the spots that had to be cut in.

He said he was just going to go make dinner instead.

David is really good at dinner. You’re really good at cutting in corners and seams.

David is really good at cutting wood. You’re really good at painting… and sometimes coming up with excuses as to why he shouldn’t be painting or stucco-ing.

What had started as weeding turned into a broken handrail, turned into planting mums, turned into scraping and priming, turned into caulking and cutting, turned into stucco and celestial ceilings and lots of paint. So much paint.

Fucking mums.

At this point we’re still not done. I may have also taken one of the doors off the hinges. I figured I could fix it. The metal panel on the exterior facing side was buckling and I had it in my head that I could just take the whole thing down then add more screws and get it all looking great.

Which is probably where David could say something like… “Hmmm… Vanessa, you’re good at a lot of things… doors aren’t one of them.”

And honestly I wouldn’t argue that. I’ve got a fucked up door sitting on saw horses to prove his point. Now he’s going to fix it. I think he will too. I’m pretty vested in his door know-how. Not his painting… not his stucco-ing… but definitely his prowess with a shitty builder grade door turned Vanessa, turned David project. He’s got this.

Currently most of the portico is painted. There’s one spot that I didn’t get to on account of the spot being over the stairs and the bullshit I have to go through to get the ladder safely on the stairs to reach the spot almost ten feet overhead… 9’9” to be exact… kind of a really random height if you think about it… though I’d venture to say that in 131 years I’m probably the only one that’s ever thought about it. So most of the portico is painted though it still needs a second coat. Then there’s the doors… the fucked up one on the saw horses (David’s project now) and the one

that takes you inside the church. It’s going to get trimmed out (David’s project on account of the power tools and my seven fingered middle school shop teacher) then I will go in and paint them both… because that’s kinda my bag.

In a few weeks we can paint the stucco-d retaining wall should the weather hold out… and in the spring I’ll paint and stencil the concrete floor and steps. We’ll also add some trellis, lots of mulch and river rock on the other side of the retaining wall and eventually some plants... besides the mums of course.

So there you have it… six mums… mulch, weeding, a broken handrail, stucco, primer, caulk, door fixes, wood replacement, trim… and a celestial ceiling.

Which is how my quick little solo project turned into another epic undertaking that David got roped into… or the theme of most of this adventure thus far.

Fucking mums.

It’s a slippery slope. Truly.

So darn close… and would you look at that retaining wall… looks like only one person stucco-d it. Don’t mind the boarded up windows or David’s grassy knoll boards. We Are Getting There!

• 

• 

• 

• 

Top left: how it started… bad. Top middle… how I plan on doing the front next year because again: slipperly slope. We won’t add the gold columns or painted stone but otherwise it will be pretty close. You can see how it currently looks (not good). Speaking of slippery slopes and future projects… eventually we plan on adding lighting to the entire building per the rendering shown in the top right and a little free library shown on the bottom row. Fucking mums, amiright?