Paints and Projects

It's been a bit since I last posted; more than a month, actually! Since then, we've gotten a lot of stuff done - we put on the first layer of primer (on a small part of the house), scraped paint off a lot more of the house, dug up broken sidewalk, cut wayward branches, emptied a pond, paved a temporary driveway, trimmed back our impressive rose hedges, rewired some phone lines, tore siding off one side of the house to replace it, removed cable, moved our kitchen sink, tore out the horrifically ugly shower, and... well, as they say, so much more. I have neither the time or the patience to describe all of what we accomplished, but here are a few highlights:

The colors, man, the colors!

This is our paint test wall; all the colors we chose are historic colors. We didn't actually plan on that; we picked out some colors, and said, "Hey, these should look good, let's go to Lowe's and see what matches." And what do you know, but our period-accurate color choices are historic colors!

The light green is the main house color. The dark green will go on the foundation bricks and on the porch ceilings - we won't need a lot of that. The red is for the trim and edging, and the yellow is for the decorative bits. Finally, the gray is for the floors.

I can't wait to get it finished, but the last paint job was so badly done, it's taking forever for us to get it all scraped and sanded. The flaking paint in the picture is due to a complete lack of primer; paint that's only a couple years old is flaking off, all over the house. But that's not the worst; the worst is the cracking paint six layers deep. It's hard, but it has deep cracks that will be a joy to fill... still. When it's done, it will look awesome!

You know you want to push it

Not quite "A Christmas Carol"

This is Marley, our door knocker. He's mostly just for looks; I'm hoping that most people will use our doorbell, instead. Mostly because our doorbell is just plain awesome. As you can see, the doorbell is an actual bell mounted on the door.

The bell has a lovely tone, and you can hear it through the whole house - and best of all, it's original! It need some TLC (and probably a new spring), but even so, it works, and it looks really good. I'm hoping to make a little sign to put above the bell, something that says "Please ring bell" in flowery script.

This is only a tiny piece

This (blurry, sorry) tangle of wires is why I hate cable. Need a TV? No problem! We'll just bolt these splitters onto the wall, drill holes through your 130 year old house, and make sure to fasten it with alternating screws and nails for hundreds of feet, back and forth and up and down, completely ignoring the fact that we could have put it out of sight underneath! Oh, yes. These cables are gone, removed with extreme prejudice. The holes, however, remain, a sobering reminder of the scars entertainment can leave.

Branching out

Finally, here is a friend of ours, chopping a branch off a tree. I am so very, very, VERY glad of all the help our friends have given us; we've had entire families camp out at our house, just to help us scrape paint and pull off rotted boards. I am overwhelmed at how blessed I am to have friends like these. Even after I trick people into coming to my house and working for hours in the sun, scraping paint. Sometimes I wonder why I have any friends left at all!