The Saga of the Blue Bench

Well, I can finally say the front of the house looks very much finished. Click on it for an enlarged view.

Here is a nice image of the front of the house. Since the last image I have shown, you can see the addition of:

1) the house number
2) the outside light
3) the garbage house
4) the bench
5) the plant
The house number was one that Claudia found from a dutch store online. We wanted to keep the blue and white theme.

The outside light was also a long search, we wanted something modern, but not too crazy looking. This one was purchased from the fine people at Hornbach

The garbage house is a little shed where we store the two big garbage bins. One for actual garbage and the other for biodegradable food waste. This was built by Claudia's dad, the handiest man in the universe. I did contribute a little, it was painted by me.
The plant is one of those pointy ones in a big pot. Claudia saw something similar on another house and thought it would go well on our front porch. I can not remember where she purchased that one.

The bench is something that Claudia wanted for a long time. When we were planning the house, one of the first things Claudia said was "look, here is a spot for a blue bench." After a long wait for the rest of the front to be finished, we went over and bought the bench at the local Toom baumarkt in Tuebingen.

It was an unpainted bag of wood at the start and I took a ridiculous long time to put it together, it was more complex than anticipated and had very few pre-drilled holes. I have to say, Ikea does a better job of these things, but I managed to get it together after a while.

Then it was a couple of weeks to search for the paint. We wanted it to match the front door, and Claudia had noted the exact "code" for the colour of this paint. It is called purple-blue #5000 in the paint classification scheme. We had to go to a few shops on a few weekends to find it, but in the end it was again at Hornbach.

I spent last Sunday painting this thing. First there was much sanding, and I had to prime it with white paint. here is how it looked after that round...Next I cracked open the purple-blue #5000 and got to it. This was the painful bit. After two coats and more than 90 minutes, I had covered the bench in paint, but it was still showing way too much white through. At this point I started calling it "The Blue Bastard." I stopped to go and have a nice BBQ dinner. I looked down on the Blue Bastard from the BBQ balcony.After eating a nice dinner, I got back down there and put on yet more paint. After another hour of paint, I was done and it looked reasonable.It was going to rain that evening (as usual) and the paint was water based, so I brought this lovely blue bench into the basement to finish drying overnight.Now it sits in front of the house as shown in the first image. The saga of the bench ends here.