It would probably be fair if you were starting to wonder whether or not I still do much painting, and the answer is yes!

But much of what I’ve been painting recently hasn’t been terribly blog-worthy.

However, it has kept me rather busy for the last couple of weeks.

First I painted the potting shed.  It was starting to look a bit rough around the edges, especially the south facing side.  Fortunately it didn’t require too much scraping and I was able to get it done in a day.

I also took some time to spring clean the interior.  Stuff tends to accumulate in there over the winter.  So I pulled everything out, washed down the walls and the floor, and then only put stuff back in that belongs there.

The potting shed wasn’t my only big paint job this spring, I also stained our fence with the help of my neighbor nnK.

You may remember that we added a new section to our fence last year.

You’re supposed to let that new wood dry out for 4 to 6 weeks before staining.  Well, in our case, we waited until spring.  But we finally got ‘er done!

Here’s an action shot.

We used a sprayer, and I used my trusty painting chair to do the bottom half.  When my trigger finger wore out, nnK took over and did the top.

At this point you might be thinking ‘whoa, black?!’

Yep, we went with black stain … or to be more precise, it’s Behr solid color stain in Slate.  I’d recently seen one of the gardening YouTubers that I follow (Dig, Plant, Water, Repeat) give a similarly decrepit fence a facelift using this color.

As we all know, dark colors make things recede.  In addition, most of this fence is in deep shade most of the day, so it sort of just disappears into the shadows now.

And that was my goal.

It also creates a good backdrop for garden photos.

The garden really pops now.

Once the fence was stained, I planted three Arctic Fire Yellow dogwoods in front of it, behind the ferns.

As you can probably tell, this time of year you can’t really even see them through the ferns.  But I’m growing the dogwoods for winter interest.  They have a lovely yellow stem that will be visible in winter when the ferns have died back, and the dogwoods have dropped their leaves.  It should look amazing against that black fence, although I’m not sure they will get enough sun in this location to keep them happy.

I do also have a pagoda dogwood tree in this area and it seems to be thriving …

although growing very slowly.  At this rate I will be 80 years old before it starts to look like an actual tree.  But it gives me hope for the Arctic Fire dogwoods.

It sure feels good to have these two projects checked off on the to-do list.  I’m planning to get to some other more fun painting projects this week, so be sure to stay tuned!