Pickets

We have pickets around our front and back porches. They show well, but require a fair bit of maintenance. Those in the back get almost no sun, so that every now and then we suddenly notice that they have mold on them. Those in front get sun for much of the day, so that the paint peels and cracks; but they still get mold on, just less. The rails of both are apt to rot. In general, if you wish to know what sort of mold spores are in the air in your neighborhood, white pickets seem to serve well.

During the last couple of weekends, we have scrubbed what we could of the mold off the back pickets and about half of those in front. Once the scrubbing is done, we will next have to scrape away the peeling or cracked paint, and then, probably in October, we will paint them, either all or as needed.

Painting pickets is a remarkably tedious job. The difficulty of any given task of painting seems to me to depend on the ratio of surface to edge or corner work. Pickets are all edge, unless one finds it convenient to paint with a brush narrower than one inch. A contractor we knew said that he always quoted such work very high for just that reason.

Once in Martha's Vineyard, I noticed a couple of men painting pickets. One sat on one side, one on the other, and the work seemed to go very efficiently that way. Probably that is how we will paint ours. The men we saw seemed to be painters by trade, and no doubt did a good, professional, expensive job. We are not painters by trade, but we suit our own budget.