Archive for the ‘before’ Category

Painting continued

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Still painting. Well, not in the storm. But you know what I mean.

What I thought we could tackle in a week or so (good god I was naive) looks like it may turn into a month or two of exterior painting. DAMMIT.

It’s turned out that painting under the eaves is probably the seventh circle of hell. It is the most tortuous sustained body movement with your arms above your head and your lower back / shoulders aching while looking directly into the sun (plus I got giant chunks of paint stuck in my long luxurious mousy brown hair) AND it needs two, possibly three coats of paint. So you have to keep going back to this awful quagmire of hell torture even though you know the pain will come. Oh, and it comes.

Looks like every surface, even though we primed, is going to need two to three coats of paint. The two of us are painting the whole Brick House compound not once, not twice, but three times.

Saturday, after four hours of repainting walls and painting under long stretches of eaves, I kind of lost my mind and thought “We could just hire some people to finish this. We could just give up and get some help. Painting is the devil.”

Maybe it’s a good thing that we took a break on Sunday. The poor Boy has to continue painting all week by himself while I’m at work.

We still need to re-mortar this little chunk of the brick planter. It fell apart sometime over the years and needs to be chiseled down, stacked and cemented together before we paint it up.

The stupid chimney. This is far as I could reach on top of a ladder with an extension stick on my roller. Pathetic. We need to figure out how to get some paint on there. Three coats of paint.

The Boy did finish sanding and patching the last of the fascia on Saturday as I went totally insane painting under the eaves. So that’s a plus. Now we can just repaint it over and over and over and over and over and over…

FILED UNDER: before, exterior

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More bits

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Our back porch is a monstrosity. It still looks exactly the same (and has the same issues) since my last house burn out.

Here is a sketchup rendering of the direction we are kind of considering going in. Whoops, that door placement is a little funny.

The water heater is still a fucking disaster. I want to go tankless, the Boy is not convinced. I’m not convinced that the investment will be worth it considering our neighborhood and the city. Our water heater works fine, it’s just U.G.L.Y it ain’t got no alibi, its ugly. But it may be worth saving up for tankless. Even for the aesthetic benefits.

I’ve been toying around with the idea of just building a new water heater box that is slatted (with an opening door of course) that is a little tighter than the sketchup views (so you see less of the ugly) but still allows ventilation, which our home inspector said we don’t have enough of…like over two years ago…

And then I got all slat happy and was like “Why not just stick slats everywhere!”.

These are gratuitous slats, there is no real sun blocking function since it’s already a covered patio and it would actually block a whole section we could walk through to the garage. The thing is, we never really walk that way since there is so much crap stored right there so I’m not sure that it’s a walking area we can’t give up easily. Plus I like that it is cohesive with the front slats and divides and defines the patio space and the “atrium” space that leads to the garage and the fire pit.

Probably not going to build it, but it was a thought…

Behold, “The Pipe That Goes Nowhere for No Reason”.

We haven’t quite figured out how to remedy this pipe situation. It is connected to the main faucet and wraps around the whole side of the house for seemingly no purpose. We want to remove it, but can’t figure out how to reattach it to the facet. The pipes would need to be cut and sweated and a custom little chunk would have to fit the weird two inch gap.

Maybe we need a plumber.

Our ghetto bathroom/laundry room door is still a mess with more pipes that go nowhere and that awesome dryer vent. None of that can get fixed till we remodel the bathroom…which seems years away. I’m not really sure how to even pretty it up till then. We can’t even install a new door till the wiring and venting issue is solved.

There is a small pony wall that divides the breezeway space from our side yard. I’ve been kicking around ideas about how to address this hunk of cement and think I may want to build a planter like this:

Filled with Mexican feather grass. Probably not in a steel planter, more likely something wooden clad.

Which reminds me, our garage doors are bowed and in horrible shape. So those need work too! Hooray.

Sorry for the rambling bits of this post, these are just a few problems that are reasserting themselves as we are continue painting. Even if we get most of the painting done there is still going to be a mess of ugly that needs fixing.

FILED UNDER: before, exterior, sketchup

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The Ugly Bits

Monday, May 17th, 2010

Nobody really cares about a BEFORE picture all by itself, I sure don’t. We all kind of want that amazingly perfect AFTER picture (usually coupled with that crap BEFORE picture for big fancy impact). Our big after is going to take much longer than expected, so here are all the ugly bits holding us up. So suck it.

I’m not sure what to do with the mess of cabling and nonsense on the back of the garage. If you look very closely on the right you can see our brand new broken window!

Below is about as much of a before and after that we can muster for now. On the left side the fascia hasn’t been touched and on the right it has been sanded, patched and primed. Too bad the flashing is in such terrible shape, ruining the effect. Just a little more to go, the Boy has been in charge of fascia repair and is so so very close to being finished.

More ugly flashing bits. It’s probably going to be another year or more before we can install a new roof and therefore new flashing. So ugliness abides for now.

The main body of the house and the garage is pretty much painted. We still have trim, eaves, the chimney, windows, vents, and all those small extra special ugly bits that need painting up.

Now that we got a good coat of paint on the house, the roof and window screens are looking extra special ghetto. What is the ratio of fixing one thing equaling everything else looking like poop?

FILED UNDER: before, exterior

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