Almost There!

We're moving into the final stretch, and Chris's paintbrush has now touched all the sides of the house, in varying degrees of completion. Here's the north side of the house, and you can see how the green looks with the "Moroccan sky" color, or as my neighbors call it, "orange."

Here you can see "before" and "after" photos of the downstairs area with the den windows (on the left side). We replaced the storm windows and painted the outside window grilles to match the trim. They were painted a yellow color, presumably to match the house. It now looks much cleaner, and another plus is that I can open all four den windows! :-)

Chris now has also started on the south side of the house, which was badly peeling before.

Chris still has a lot of trim, gutters, downpipes, doors, and the porch to finish, but he's getting there!

Yet Another Update

The upper part of the back side of the house now looks so nice! And I got the flat roof over part of the kitchen, the downstairs bathroom, and the den re-done as well. It turns out that it wasn't done very well to begin with, which explains some of the leakage in the den.

Moroccan sky garage doors! Chris also replaced the wood framing the doors (and the sides) and painted that the trim color. Now we just gotta get that pretty green up there so we can see better how the three colors will look together. For now, use your imagination. :-)

Chris has his work cut out for him on the back and sides of the garage. The bottom and side boards are rotten, so he'll replace them with treated wood. I had a company dig out and dispose of some of the soil here, as it was pretty high, and we couldn't see where the grade of the garage was.

Here you can see where it's particularly bad. It's going to look so much better when it's all finished!

Latest Update of Front of House

So, this is what the house looks like now. Chris (the painter) is still working on the front porch, as he's had to replace a number of boards, such as the small horizontal boards connecting the pillars. Tomorrow, I think he'll continue with the second coat on the front next to the porch and then the contrast color, "Moroccan sky," which will replace the reddish colors here. The porch concrete will also be painted the Moroccan sky color, as will the front door and the garage doors, to give the green and creme trim a bit of interesting contrast.

I ordered new sheers for the kitchen, so once I get those, I'll post pictures of my bright and newly painted kitchen. We had a bit of an ordeal with the ceiling fan, requiring the work of an electrician. Apparently, this is not surprising, given the fact that this is an 80-year old house.

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.