The Porch
The porch floor has obviously been painted a few times and has started to show it’s age. The areas nearest the windows are peeling and many areas are down to bare wood. It really needs to be taken back down to bare wood throughout and re-painted. This was one of the projects around the house that I really wanted to work on at the beginning of the summer so we could enjoy it. However, many other projects came up and this one got pushed aside. I have worked on it off and on over the summer, slowly chiseling paint off. I think there are at least 2 colors and a layer of varnish on there currently. After probably a good 6 hours of working on it, I’m about half done taking the paint off. I’m thinking at this point I will try to sand the edges to smooth them out and paint over what I can’t remove. It seems to really want to stay on there in some spots.
So at some point when we have good weather and a fresh can of porch floor paint, we will finally have a beautiful floor in there. Maybe I’ll paint the walls in there too. I’m not a liking the dirty blue color much. Any color suggestions?
(the pictures are from before I removed a lot of it, so I’ll try to get an updated picture on here soon)
shows how much has come off on its own
close up of the area near the windows
Heavy Lifting
We knew when we bought the house that getting a washer and dryer down the basement stairs would be a challenge. Read about our tribulations after the break.
A Much Overdue Welcome!
Before we even bought this house, we had planned to have a blog that would let everyone see what we were up to. We had the name picked out well before closing day. We had the website purchased within a few days of closing. We have over 5 GB of pictures from everything we have done so far. And, I’m saddened to say, we are very behind on sharing it with all of you.
My plan is add a few new entries every week. I have enough material to keep that going for a long time. I had hoped to be adding all of it as the projects were being completed but life got crazy and that didn’t happen. But its all news to you guys, so it’s not really a big deal.
For those of you who haven’t see our house yet, I will be adding plenty of pictures of the interior and exterior, along with, for you design junkies, what my color schemes are.
There are many posts on the main page here for your reading pleasure. But also check out the projects page for some of our current and future projects (link up top or on the side).
I hope you enjoy what you read and continue checking back! Please feel free to comment, we’d love the feedback!
A small teaser of what is still to come on this blog:
- How we got our arcade machine and washer/dryer in the house (they were a challenge)
- The gross state of the kitchen floor before I cleaned it
- New and improved kitchen sink strainers
- The story of why adding gutters to the north side of the house is so important
- Some updates on the re-finishing of the porch floor
- Our many new IKEA purchases and what we did with them
- Some of our landscaping projects
Closing Day Celebration & Discovery
The night of May 7, both Marc’s and my immediate family got together for a BBQ. It was pretty fun but I feel could have been better had it not been 45 degrees outside. Cold weather does not make for a good BBQ and as such we ended up spending a lot of time indoors. Obviously if its 45 degrees outside, then inside will be chilly too. So we kicked on our furnace to heat things up, only to discover that it seemed to need to start up quite frequently. Upon further investigation we found a very disgusting and extremely clogged furnace filter. Not only was it well past its replacement time but it was also starting to fall apart. (see pictures for full appreciation). So as you can guess, our first house purchase was new filters for the furnace.
