Aaaah, home ownership is fun! The exterior paint started peeling last summer and has accelerated since, leaving me with no other choice but to find a painter this spring/summer. I discovered that the most recent paint job was a quickie, probably to sell the house, and they didn't even paint the back of the garage! I didn't even know that and am embarrassed that I didn't. My neighbors behind me, though, probably wondered when I would find out.
So, to document progress, I thought it would be fun to take pictures of the different phases. He we have Chris, the painter, in the first phases of prepping the front and side of the house.
I've always disliked the rug that was on the front porch, so I wanted to take it off and repaint the porch a nice contrast color. It was a bit of a discovery, that's for sure.
There are some cracks that need repair...
And the 80 years of paint that Chris chipped away.
Chris is also fixing little things here and there, like making the door frames more appealing, which he says doesn't take that much work, as he's got lots of smaller pieces of wood lying around. I wish it were that easy for me. :-)
This is just to show you how bad the peeling had gotten. Apparently, this was a sprayjob, with no priming. It lasted a couple of years. At least I get to pick a new color, since I was never really thrilled with this one, anyway.
These are the various colors I tried out. I'm going with the last green one for the body of the house ("moss print"), the orangish one ("Moroccan sun") for the contrast color, and the trim will pretty much be similar to what it already is. I'm glad that I took Mike's advice to get samples, because I saw photos of houses painted the other colors, and well, the colors don't look like the photos, that's for sure.
Stay tuned for future updates! This will be fun, watching my house transformed from drab colors to brighter ones.
My house is almost 85 years old, and it still has some of its old features, such as the old exhaust fan in the kitchen. Chris was trying to figure out what to do about it, and thought that taking it out completely and covering that space up would be best in terms of winter drafts in the kitchen and making sure that old wiring wasn't a fire hazard. It was an interesting job, I thought. Here's what it looked like from the inside (with the door flap open on the outside.) 
And here's what it looked like from the outside, once Chris started taking it out. It was really dirty and gross. 
I know it's a bit strange to be documenting this so much, but I was fascinated with what he was doing. So, here's the hole in my kitchen, soon to be covered up and painted over. 
Here it is on the inside, covered up and waiting for Chris to paint it tomorrow. As it turns out, he's going to paint my kitchen (after we briefly negotiated on price), as I don't have the exact same green in kitchen paint to cover up this spot. Well, the green parts of the kitchen need it (I added some terra cotta color when I first moved in), and he's going to do the ceiling as well. Tomorrow and Friday will be good days for this since it's going to rain.
