We completed a very nice decorative painting job for previous customers, Gwen Seaquist and Laurel Southard. We had previously done some staining and painting of their rebuilt front staircase. Now our job was in the back entry room. Gwen had a great design idea of using a gold metallic paint on the walls. These paints also have an iridescent quality, so that they show a different shade of color as you look at the wall from different directions. To complement that look, we decided to restain the swinging door to the kitchen.

We painted the front of the Danby Town Hall this month. This included the tower, the octagonal cupola, and the large historic oval windows and massive front doors. There was some significant wood replacement that had to be done and we subcontracted this to Nathaniel "Juge" Greenspun. He did an awesome job matching some old style crown moulding and rebuilding a large section of eave trim. Beside the heights involved - we had to use a 60' aerial lift - this was a lead paint job. Our years of experience with lead paint encapsulation and abatement have given us stream-lined procedures and highly skilled workers.

The first week of 2012, we had the opportunity to work in the famous Moosewood restaurant. Many restaurants shut down for periodic maintenance work. Moosewood does theirs the first week of the new year. One of the owners, along with their architect, Claudia Brenner, came up with a list of painting needs and then more came up as the work progressed. Much of the work was routine maintenance painting, of which we are highly skilled and efficient performing. We seldom just "paint" a wall or ceiling.

We just painted a ceiling and soffit in a sitting room. The interesting thing was that we painted it a darker gray with a touch of green. That are of the room is only 10 feet by 10 feet. On the other side of the soffit, a similar area of the same sitting room, the ceiling is covered in a nice silk-like fabric. Then the ceiling goes to white in the open bedroom where the windows overlook Cayuga Lake. In December, we had installed a glass-beaded wallcovering in the sitting room. Its background is gray-green.

Starting in early May we began an historic renovation at Cornell University's Sage House. Sage House is a stone building on Seneca Street in Ithaca; the building was built in the 1860s as an infirmary. Sage house is currently used by Cornell University Press. Phase one of this large project was to replace the slate roof. Our job was to refinish twelve dormers on the roof. Dormers are sections of the house built into the roof, in this case as rooms on the third floor. All of the paint that was currently on the building contained lead.