I pronounce it the French way: Pro-zhay Soo-preeeze.

Next door, at the Brown Palace there is a large screened porch with a painted floor.



It's in pretty bad shape and I decided to paint it, but I don't trust myself to do a good job. However, knowing that first the old paints needs to be scraped off, I decided I can do that and then Mr. Troutbend can help me with the painting.







The floor boards are pine and they were varnished at one time, and then painted over with brown paint. The crunchy stuff is the removed paint and varnish.

I'm using an electric heat gun to soften the paint and varnish. It's a large area, the size of a one-car garage, and I was afraid it was going to take forever to get done, but it goes pretty fast. All told I think it will come to 9 hours, spread over several days.

There is big furniture out there, and I can't move it out by myself, so I did one half of the porch floor and then moved it to the other half.

Here is the soo-preeze: I will tell Mr. Troutbend that I want to repaint the porch floor, and he'll say "there's a lot to it - it will need the old paint removed." So we'll go look at it, and Surprise! the old paint is already off! Surprise!

But the surprise has been dampened because I had to ask him to bring his electric sander from Las Vegas and he asked me what kind of sanding I want to do. Apparently he has several types of sanding devices. I told him floor sanding, but just where will be a surprise. He'll probably guess where, but he won't expect it to be ready to sand right away.