Oi! What's Behind the Garage?!!

It's kind of interesting and even creepy to find about what previous owners have done to your house. When I began this house painting project (that is, when I started looking for painters), the fact that the back wall of the garage had not been painted in years, leaving it a different color from the rest of the house and garage, was pointed out to me. Well, there's a fence back there, and I had had no occasion to take a look, which, believe you me, I definitely will in future houses! Anyway, I thought I should trim some of the trees back there to help the painter out. In doing so, I discovered that one of the previous owners had taken out carpeting only to discard it behind the garage. With great effort, I dug it out, cut parts of the individual rugs, bound them, and took them to the street to be picked up by the city trash removal service (with a fee of $7.50 per bundle, and there were three bundles). It was a messy job, and I cursed several times at the fact that I was removing things from this house that should have been taken care of years ago. Now I'm going to try to level out the soil behind the garage, so that the painter can paint the bottom boards. I hope I don't discover anything else back there!

Old yucky kitchen exhaust fan

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.

Oooooh, our first glimpse of GREEN!

Chris (my painter) got a Behr paint that has primer in it, so we get to see the green already. I'm really liking the color. It's going to rain in the next couple of days, so unfortunately, progress will be slow.

Here's the front porch.

Prepping the House for Painting

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.

Mike and the Girls

So, it's been a while since I last posted. It's been a hard winter, and I've been working like crazy, so I haven't had a whole lot of cute new photos to post...until I took this one. Mike is not much of a kitty fan, but they sure do like him! We were both on the sofa, but look who they're gravitating toward, especially Katya, who is perched as if she can watch Mike over his shoulder.

And here's Katya, attempting to get on Mike's lap as he works on the computer. She does this to me all the time.

Lookie what we found in the Christmas stockings!

When she was there for two weeks in late November, Mike's mom stuffed our stockings, but we forgot to look there on Christmas. What a sweet surprise and treat!

Christmas Dinner

For Christmas, my parents ordered a pressure cooker and had it sent to Mike's house. I found a nice recipe for Cornish game hens stuffed with prunes and dried apricots. Here are the fruits of my labor, so to speak. The hens were also cooked with sweet potatoes.

These are yummy rolls, made of the same ingredients as stuffing. I found this recipe in one of Shaunda's holiday magazines when I was in Florida.

I'm so happy that I didn't ruin the meal! It was my first time using the pressure cooker (although we ran two tests with just water), and also my first time making Cornish hens.