House update

Since I haven't done anything all week except cough and sneeze, here's a report on Corrie's productive weekend of porch column and window trim painting.


And to give you an idea of what the balcony color scheme will hopefully look like someday, here's a photo of the back of our house where we painted the gingerbread shingles a long time ago. (Ignore eyesore back porch.) Anyone willing to hang over the edge of the roof to paint the hard to reach places above the balcony? I doubt we will have takers on that one.

We have Ourselves Quite a House

As I find myself uninspired to blog about anything I'm doing, it hasn't gone unnoticed that Corrie has been busy moving along on a project we started back in 2003: rebuilding our front porch. Here's how things looked back then. As far as we can tell, the concrete columns that appear here are the original columns for the porch. They were so heavy-looking and an odd fit for the house, I thought.


This wasn't a weekender project. Corrie (and I-I think I tore out some floorboards! I helped!) tore out the entire porch and columns. If I remember correctly, Corrie jacked up the house next to each column so he could easily knock them down. You didn't know which way the column would fall-we ended up taking out a section of our neighbor's fence with one column. Good thing they were nice neighbors and had a crappy fence anyway! I got a good photo of one of the columns coming down. Those blocks sort of bounce all over when they hit the ground. You wouldn't think concrete could bounce, but that's what it did.


We had little friends living under the column in the footing, including earthworms and roots from the awful vines that keep creeping over to the house.


I didn't remember this until I looked back at these photos, but Corrie must've been rebuilding each column after he knocked it out, which included pouring a new concrete footing, reusing the bottom set of blocks, adding a new concrete form on top of those blocks, then adding a wooden post on top of that. Here we have new column on the left and old column on the right.


If I didn't know that I took this photo, I'd say that Corrie is looking down at me in the hole I managed to fall into one day during this project. How come he can tell me not to fall into a hole one minute, and the next minute, what do you know, I've stepped backwards into the hole.

Once this portion of the project wrapped up, the porch stayed as it was over the following years. (Time flies!) Here's a shot the county assessor took in 2005 before they jacked up our property value.


Corrie lit a fire under himself (I don't light fires-I'm afraid of fire) late this summer and has replaced the temporary wood sections of the columns with permanent posts and has added nice finishing forms all around. We also have a nifty green and red railing now, which the porch never had before. Still some painting to do and a new ceiling to build, but things are looking up! I told Corrie the other night that we really do have ourselves quite a house. I think the front of it will be quite over the top if we ever also get the balcony redone.

We're ghetto now, at least temporarily

In preparation for a new washer and dryer (the dryer finally gave out yesterday) Corrie moved the old ones out into the yard. Which is more ghetto, the photo that includes the dorm fridge (which works and is great for outdoor parties!) or the one with the old truck with a flat tire? I guess we won't be winning yard of the month anytime soon. I know Corrie will get them off to the metal recycling place very soon.



To offset the ghetto, here are some new crocus I found blooming in the yard. I should really know what kind they are, but I don't.

Naptime

Almost everyone in the house is napping this afternoon, even I took a short nap, and Corrie is also still napping, but I doubt he wants his photo on my blog. Scabbers and Norman:

Todd:


Even the strays, Itty Bittiest and Oreo, are sleeping in Corrie's old truck that's still full of yard waste for a trip to the dump. Yard waste makes for nice cat beds, I guess.


In other news, Corrie is making good progress on installing the tile on the bathroom walls. We're still not sure what to do for floor tile. Almost everything we see is too similar to what we used on the walls. I'm ok with a lighter color that we found the other night, but Corrie said he doesn't like it. All I really care about is no light-colored grout. It's impossible to keep that stuff clean unless you use chemicals that will burn your hands off.


In seedling news, the only thing coming up so far are my red marigolds. I'm hoping everything else will soon follow. Here's the full seed starter contraption that Corrie built a few years ago on a snow day. I have the ability to move the fluorescent bulbs up as the plants get taller, and I can also move more plants up to the higher shelf and install my other lights. There's an ominous glow in this photo.

Mission Accomplished!

After I pulled into the driveway today, I wondered what piece of purple litter had gotten stuck in the flower bed next to the house. What a surprise-it was the crocus I had been searching for!


I guess I should mark this spot for next spring so I don't have to search so much.

In other news, Corrie is gearing up to work on our ongoing upstairs bathroom remodel. When I say ongoing, I mean ongoing. I went back to find some photos of when we tore out the old bathroom, and I was a little shocked to see they dated back to 2004. I'm probably the one who made this mess (back in 2004, dang, I was still in my 20s then-Courtney, you still lived here!):

Here, also in February 2004, our new tub installed. Corrie can correct me if I'm wrong, but I utilized the tub just as it appears here before we had any drywall up. I used to stare up at the 100 year old cobwebs stuck on the ceiling joists.


Slow-forward to 2008: Corrie has almost finished with tile in the shower, and he just bought more title to finish what's going on the bathroom walls. We're going to have to pick another color of tile for the floor, since it was so long ago that we decided on something that we forgot what we decided on!