Scrub-a-Dub-Dub

If I had my hands around the neck of the person who built the roof joists for our back screened patio, I would squeeze that neck until he turned purple!  He caused us a great deal of work today, with more work to follow tomorrow.

The roof joists are a pain when they need washing
or painting.  Unfortunately, they need both this year.

The roof joists are set up in a lattice pattern so that the support for the fiberglass roof above is in various places.  This helped the builder because he could stagger the joists when nailing them into place.  The staggered joists also provide more support to carry the snow load on the roof in the winter time.

OK, OK, I get it.  I understand why the joists are positioned that way, but that does not make dealing with them any easier.

The vertical support columns are easy to paint, but the
roof supports certainly are not.

We knew that one of our tasks this summer was to wash and to paint the support posts and the roof joists on the back porch.  We spent this morning doing nothing but washing the dirt off of those surfaces.  A little TSP with warm water was the mixture of the day, but the porch was so dirty that each of us went through at least three bucketsful to keep the water relatively usable.  What a pain each little square of joists is to clean!  The corners are nearly impossible to get clean, and having everything overhead certainly did not make the job faster or easier.

Once we got to the outer parts of the joists and the rain gutters, the job did not get any better. In fact, the outside was almost dirtier than the inside.  Rick also took the gutter guards off and found a royal muddy mess inside the gutters which he had to clean.

We scraped the paint where necessary; tomorrow we'll add the prime coat where needed and perhaps a little Kilz in certain areas.  Painting this vertical posts is not difficult, but the joists of the ceiling are more difficult to paint than they are to wash.  Neither of us is looking forward to our job tomorrow.

I just hope the final result of our efforts will protect the porch for a few more years and will be worth the effort in the end.  Even then, I still would have murder on my mind if the designer ever came onto the back porch.