Archive for the ‘exterior’ Category

Garage Doors & ect.

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Yeah. They are gross.

I’m seriously considering replacing the warped and rotted doors with commercial steel roll up doors. I like that they are cheap, take up a small amount of space and have a linear horizontal pattern. It’s a thought, but nothing has been decided. It’s an idea for “The Future”. I think for now we will paint them black and figure out the next step later.

I’ve continued thinking about the back patio since the last post. I’m kind of sold on eventually installing a tankless water heater so that we can at least free up that tight corner.

The other thing I was wavering about was continuing the slats on the back patio. I’ve been trying to figure out how we could get rid of at least one of the three stupid doors and not do any major masonry cutting and rearranging. We always try to create the most impact for the least amount of money and skill required. Any MAJOR rearranging of exterior exits of the house is not an option. Every opening in the house is lined with custom bull-nosed cement bricks from 1950 and they don’t make that shit to patch things up with anymore. Plus we don’t know how to do it and we can’t afford it and I’m not convinced that the investment will pay off in the long run in our neighborhood.

So…my idea is to make a solid redwood wall that intersects with the open slats that will essentially “cover” the weird third exterior door. On the inside of the bathroom we can just rip down molding stick some insulation in and drywall over the door. *POOF* Door gone. It would not a huge investment, it creates more interior space in the bathroom and we are totally DIY capable of doing it.

Afterwards we can throw a butterfly chair and a small table in that new alcove. Then the little useless back porch area becomes a sitting destination, or smoking area since that seems to be what most visitors use it for.

BTW – one of my dream pieces of furniture is a Richard Schultz petal table. Drool…

My favorite part of the front porch slat screen is the area that wraps around the side of the house. I think it would be nice to mimic that on the back porch and create an architectural division of the various exterior areas into more manageable rectangles.

Also, check it out! I fixed those pesky fake shade sails to look more accurate. I think I’m kind of sold on them. They are pretty cheap, but make a giant statement whilst keeping the hottest (most sun exposed) side of the house a bit cooler.

Apologies for the gratuitous sketchup posts. I know…boring ideas for the future…less talk more action! But now that we are moving along with the exterior I want to make sure to really plan everything out so that we use our money wisely by really thinking through the entire design and hopefully keeping it all cohesive. Plus, your guys tips and experience with things like water heaters, plants, shade sails, paint, ect. have really helped us figure out the potential cost/problems/solutions that we might encounter. It’s amazingly helpful.

Windows

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Long before we even started priming the house The Boy took a good long chunk of time to restore the rotten and decrepit window sills. He sanded, patched and primed the wood long before we decided on a house color…well, except for two. There are two windows left on the garage that haven’t gotten the restoration treatment (somewhat luckily since I never got a good “before” image of the untouched sills).

Yes, they were all this crappy.

This weekend was the first time I got to paint over the primer and check out our fully restored sills. It’s been about a year and a half long process to get to this point, but its probably been over 50 years since they were first painted. During all that time since the house was first built it seems like no one ever thought to give them a second coat of paint. There was only one thin off-white coat of paint that was just completely flaking off. Probably better than having to sand down years worth of gloppy paint jobs.

We did recently hear from a neighbor that The Brick House used to be a halfway house for a good long while. Awesome. Go Hemet!

Now what to do about those crappy aluminum windows…

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…