Still prepping exterior, dry fit of porch

 I gave up pretending to myself that if I just painted on sufficient blue paint, that the exterior painted surfaces would look better. So instead I painted them with gesso to fill in the grain and small gaps, and applied some filler on the larger gaps and splintered areas. Once that was sanded down, then it was back to applying coats of blue paint.  It's looking a lot better now and I've also painted three coats onto some siding planks left over from when I built the Willowcrest, to use as clapboard. 

I'm going to attempt a restrained 'painted lady' exterior treatment so I've swatched three pink acrylic colours to see what they look like when dry.  I'm wondering about adding some fishscale shingled areas for visual interest.

Porch

The exterior treatment on the porch side needs to take into account the porch and its roof fitting on properly.  So I started locating and punching out the porch pieces as mentioned in the confusing and inadequately illustrated instructions.  Several of the narrower trim pieces literally fell apart as I punched them out: some of the crappy plywood sheets seem to have a front and back skin of decent wood sandwiched around nothing but dark brown wood gravel.  I've patched them back together with copious amounts of wood glue.

Then I worked my way through the instructions, referring to the box lid, to try to figure out where the various porch pieces go.  My longer piece of roof trim is about an inch too short and the front side roof trim piece is non-existent, so I've cut some of my own stripwood for that purpose.  I didn't like how the front and rear column have the rough end grain on show, so I've cut some more stripwood to cover those up on the side elevation.

Once I figured out what went where, and which surfaces need to be painted, I sprayed it all with sealer in preparation for the filling/sanding/priming/painting cycle to begin anew.