Paint!

Front of the house is painted!

(Painting gutters is misery.)


Body color is Benjamin Moore Gunmetal and trim is Benjamin Moore Graphite. The soffits are painted Sherwin Williams' Plymouth Green.
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Exterior design help, continued.

Well, this is never ending.

We still don't know what to do.

So far we've talked with contractors about tearing out the front steps ($600, even without replacing them), pouring new concrete (a problem because of the crawlspace access), building a wood deck around the existing steps (the contractor spent nearly an hour here, then I never heard back) and, finally, cladding the existing steps in flagstone and tearing out the walkway to also create a flagstone path. Whew.

And it's all expensive.

On top of that, we determined that we indeed have lead paint so the cost just to prep the house properly (requiring removal with an infrared heater) is as much as I thought it would be to do the whole job. We have opted to let the professionals prep the house and remove the lead paint, and we will get to paint it. Yay! (feigned enthusiasm)

Back to the porch though. I think we have to live with it as is for a while. We can move the crawlspace access for $500, which will allow us to landscape the small plot next to the stairs more easily and wait another year or so to build a porch :(  I guess there's no rush, but still....

Here's the mockup:

Upcoming: we are almost finished selecting paint colors!

Exterior design help wanted, Part 2

Here is another mockup of the front porch, this time enclosed in wood painted to match. We like it!

Landscaping success!

After wrestling out 2.75 stumps left behind from the total front bed chainsaw massacre a couple of months ago, we planted a beautiful shore pine and were a little underwhelmed with the results. We needed a professional.



My buddy Doug from Gardenmakers came and removed the last of the stump I couldn't excise and came up with a game plan for us. This weekend, in just 7.5 hours, the front yard was totally transformed!

Here is the rock that went in the bed. Turns out two of the three local stone dealers went out of business and the one that was left wanted a ridiculous amount for a basic rock. Five hundred dollars for a fairly average looking rock?? We went to some other garden shops looking for a "counterpoint to the pine," as Doug put it, and found nothing but birdbaths and gnomes. Then, my buddies and I happened upon a construction site and spotted a rock just sitting there in the mud next to the street... So.....we picked it up and put it in the trunk. Turns out it is some sort of classic local olivine or something, finding new life as a little mountain in our quiet garden.



I really don't think the construction site will miss it.


Another productive weekend at our little bungalow!

I am so excited to get this house painted, but we're getting so much rain it's not going to be possible for a while. Once the painting is complete (I'm budgeting four weekends--one per side of the house, which might be optimistic--I really have no idea) we can start in on the back yard!

Exterior design help wanted!

As spring finally approaches, we are ready to begin planning some exterior renovations. Paint is coming soon, as it's needed badly, but the more exciting planning is around landscaping. We are tackling the northeast bed this weekend, so I'll post pictures of that soon (a landscaper friend recommended building up a bed for our beautiful tree to sit higher up, so that's the goal in the next few days).

The design question now is about how to get rid of the awful handrail that splits the picture window. It's such an eyesore for me and I can't wait to tear it down. (See how much better lifting that tree will look?)

I want to extend the front steps so there is a longer platform/patio beneath the picture window. I am hoping we can resurface the concrete that is there so it will match the new. Here are two mockups: one with poured in form concrete and one in which the vertical walls are clad or created in brick.

(concrete)

(brick)

(Ignore the roof peeking up behind the house--that's a future addition and another story!)

I think the brick keeps the house more inline with the "mid century modest" style that it is.

My questions are:
1) What kind of costs am I looking at here?
2) How much more expensive would it be to use brick?
3) Is it even possible to find brick that matches?

Any input is welcome. Thanks for stopping by!!

Ode to a Kitchen Faucet

I just finished doing the dishes--not a chore I adore exactly but not the worst either (read: mowing)--and thought I'd give some deserved praise to, yes, our faucet.



Had anyone told me I would spend well over $300 for a faucet I would have called them nuts so I guess it's good that no one warned me how expensive faucets are and how it just didn't matter in the end. When you really start looking at and comparing faucets you see that there's a world of difference between them. (Also, who knew the Italy is famous for them?) It's an item you use every single day, multiple times per day and you expect it to last a long time. I think there is literally nothing else in the house that gets used as often as the kitchen faucet, so why not get the one that is AWESOME then?

We got a pull-down model and it switches from a stream to a glorious spray at the flick of a button and just makes you want to be a tiny gnome and crawl in the steaming sink shower, too. Okay, that might be going too far, but if you are wondering if you should get the cheap faucet and maybe replace it later when it breaks, don't! Just get a good one and enjoy the faucet bliss.

(Unfortunately, I can't remember the model, but we bought a Danze.)



On the turntable:

Lorde - Pure Herione

Solstice tree!

Yesterday was my first day of vacation, which I celebrated by eating for breakfast a very special pink-iced sugar cookie shipped to my door from Larry's House of Cakes. To deal with the resulting sugar rush, I went for a jog around the neighborhood and met a new neighbor who was busy limbing a tree in his front yard with a chainsaw.



Not more than five minutes later, our front yard went from this:

To this:

You know when someone you know well shaves their mustache and their face looks all weird and wrong? Turns out the same thing happens when you take away ALL of the plants in your front yard.









Why would we do such a thing? Well, the plants that were there before had not been trimmed in many years and there was just no saving them. Any pruning would have left us with only wood, so we decided to wipe the slate clean.











Last weekend, we stopped in The Garden Spot, the sweetest neighborhood nursery ever, and stumbled on this shore pine:









We bought it :)





And then we had to deal with our new purchase.















Being a novice at tree planting, I gathered what tools I could and had my best buddy/landscape lifeline on speed dial. Getting up the root ball of the space's former occupant was no easy task, and we still have four more stumps to go. E thought she'd give the pick a swing.



(No houses were harmed in the taking of this picture.)

A shore pine is the same genus as a Japanese Black Pine, but a different species. This was has been well-trained already and we will have to learn a bit about maintaining it and getting it to grow in a, aesthetically-pleasing manner. We think it adds a needed vertical element to our squat little bungalow and can't wait to watch it grow. 

What you can't see is that it was so cold and raining all day. It's time for an AMAZING Christmas beer from Kulshan Brewery, which happens to be a stone's throw from The Garden Spot. Keepin' it very local (except for the damn sugar cookies).







































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