No more progress this weekend, Saturday we took the day off to relax all day and Sunday Ryan had to work and I started Alex’s Halloween costume at naptime so no house time. I do have pictures from our Friday progress finally though…
The peak! The soffit and windows are completely done, just need to do the green on the siding and the red on the shakes and moldings!Same below, the trim around the door etc is done but green on the siding has to be done under the porch.
Railings are all primed!!!!
I’m very happy with 4 days of progress and we got to relax a bunch. The weather really held out for us and we got everything done. Now if we get good weather again we can finish painting, if not it will at least be in better shape for the winter than last year. And back to the bathroom tiling project!
Well it was cooler than yesterday but still warm enough to paint today (so far we are lucky!). Please hold off rain!
Ryan continued painting the porch soffit and posts the front is now almost done!
Porch soffit and posts almost all painted in the front
Then we got a coat of paint on the siding on the section we started yesterday and a coat of yellow on the soffit and crown and frieze boards (still need to do the windows and all cutting in since the green was still wet). Paint took longer to dry today (cooler plus primer dries faster).
Now the color matches down below
Then we got the primer on the siding on the rest of the driveway side. We decided it was more important to protect the siding before winter in case we run out of rain free days but we do hope to get the soffit done too. Ryan finished the day with getting primer under the porch on the siding after I stripped the baseboard under there. Under the porch we can finish up rain or shine but we’d like to get everything done.
Green primer on all the siding
There is a little green primer left to do (just the edges of the siding under the porch where I caulked and it didn’t dry fast enough). So we’ll get that done tomorrow. We may rent a lift tomorrow and/or friday for working on the peak, mostly it depends on the weather but it would be helpful for sure!
What a wonderful weekend weather-wise! And everything-wise, we had a great weekend in general. Saturday morning we got out to the outlet mall for a couple of hours, getting Alex new shoes and clothes for the fall (hello after-school-has-started sales) 🙂
During naptime Ryan and I worked on the house, I got the first coat of red paint on the peak, and touched up the red molding (after filling the holes). Ryan worked on the porch soffit (caulking) on the right side of the house where the hill is (his sister is afraid of heights and that was too much for her).
First coat only…A soffit view, this was just after finishing up rounding the corner.
Then I got one railing primed – so we can finally see what they look like yellow, awesome! After naptime we ran over to home depot and the grocery store (lots of errands to run!), so painting was done for the day. Good progress though for just naptime (I also continued painting during after-nap-snack).
Sunday we went out to our favorite breakfast spot, then a stop at the park to get the crazy energy out. At naptime it was just me out there painting (football season has officially started so Ryan was on kid duty for the rest of the day). I got the second coat of red on the shakes, finished the prep on the porch soffit, then primed the last 2 sides (right side and back side on right), so the soffit is all yellow now.
The 2 sides I primed today (the posts aren’t done because i can reach them from standing). This is the one railing that is primed as well.Finished shakes
I also repaired the crescent window up there, I still have to glaze it but the wood putty needs some time to dry so hopefully some day this week I can glaze the window and then next weekend get it painted along with touching up the trim up there. Getting closer to calling something done!
I’ve been saying I was going to take a day off to paint all summer and finally the weather was nice, someone else was here so I felt safe working up on a ladder and it all worked out. So I took today off of work and got some painting done.
Maribeth has continued her work on the porch all week. She got the soffit and posts of the porch all prepped all the way around, all primed and the inside painted too. We hope to finish it up ourselves this weekend, putting the bathroom on hold just long enough to finish this one project.
For my day off I decided to tackle the front peak. The prep work took most of the day, stripping paint, sanding, scraping, filling holes, caulking etc. This window I’m repairing in place so I got it stripped and removed the cracked glazing.
Prep work doneThe other side
After that I took a late lunch and then went up to prime. I got everything primed in time to make it over to Alex’s school for her Fall Festival where she got to touch rabbits, chickens and a goat. 🙂
And primed (need to buy glazing still so the window isn’t done).The other side.
The forecast calls for a dry weekend so I’m hoping to get this peak finished up completely (including the window??) and the porch done. It would be a good stopping place before winter on the outside if we don’t have more time (not giving up but being realistic).
Well we went camping for labor day weekend so no house progress but on the way back to NH we picked up my sister-in-law and she’s out for the week to work on the house! Ryan took Tuesday off and the two of them finished up the paint removal on the porch soffit/posts that the painter last year never finished!
Front peak just about finishedThe tops of the posts (the detail work) looks great!
The sideDriveway side
This is a lot of work – the porch is huge. Today Maribeth is filling holes and caulking so far. Next up is sanding. Hopefully tomorrow she’ll get to actually paint (much easier than prep work) 🙂 Ryan and Maribeth worked through the rain yesterday but the weather is looking great for the rest of the week!
Weekend plans went a little wonky this past weekend. We were supposed to go back to NY originally to celebrate Aimee’s birthday. Then Ryan decided he needed to stay home to make progress on the house so we can still get this kitchen done in time (there’s been more work upstairs than we had hoped before we can finish said kitchen). So it was going to be Alex and I driving back.
Then Aimee’s back which had been really bad all week wasn’t getting better (worse?) so we considered getting together in CT instead for just a day trip, then PJ couldn’t make the trip and my cold that started thursday actually got worse for the weekend. So we cancelled the whole thing.
So Saturday Ryan got up and started the dump runs (since the dump is only open till 1 on saturday we usually have a couple of runs to do with last weekend’s demo). By the second (or third?) trip, Alex had finished her nap and we decided to hit home depot all together and get cement board and 2x4s. The rest of the day included Ryan taking down the bathroom walls, putting in new sill plates for the new walls and cutting out tons of piping (cast iron drains/vents). The good thing about only using a single bathroom in our house is that the only plumbing that needs to be on is that single bathroom.
no bathroom wallsa view from the other side
The upstairs is mostly done for now (on hold till the kitchen is done) but we do need to finish the sub floor (patch it and then add cement board). Ryan also framed in the old pantry door (into a wall) in the kitchen so we can now run the rest of the outlet circuit around that corner and finish it up.
The final project was getting some stain on our new railings, they needed a nice final sanding and then the stain to match the deck:
cedar railings with red semi-transparent stainthe nice side of our house 🙂
Don’t be fooled by little I have to report for the weekend, taking those pipes out took quite a while, as did the floor prep up to this point. What is left in the upstairs is minor. One more weekend before thanksgiving and then insulation. The kitchen is almost ready for insulation (just a bit more electrical) and the upstairs needs very little prep (some nails pulled). I took the whole week off for thanksgiving so I can work up in the attic to prep that for insulation on monday and tuesday. That’s where the real work is at this point.
Once insulation is in, we just have to finish the kitchen electrical, then drywall and put in cabinets (that’s all?!) not really, but those are the big ones.
What a long weekend, the little tiny bathroom upstairs was insane, Ryan said there were 3 layers of renovation and each time they renovated they didn’t take anything down so we had more plaster from a tiny bathroom than we did from our entire kitchen demo!
Saturday morning Ryan got to work on the demo (starting with some dump runs which will never end!). Our neighbor came over to play with alex for a couple of hours saturday so I was able to help here and there with demo and other things. Ryan got most of the bathroom demo’d and what will be the laundry room, leaving the tub, toilet and floor (and miscellaneous unfinished demo) for sunday.
Then Ryan’s parents showed up for the evening and we all went out to dinner (Alli-boo got some great snuggles in at the restaurant and did great considering it was latish for her to be out and about). No melt downs though and she got to try a sippy cup for the first time (which she grabbed right on to!).
Sunday Ryan and I finished up the bathroom demo and cleanup while Suzanne spent the day with Alli-boo and Mark installed our new railings he built! They look amazing, and half of our porch is going to be the envy of the neighborhood for sure now! Hopefully next summer the whole porch will be 🙂
Alli gets some snuggles from grandma at the restaurantnew railings – they look exactly like the original but better! We plan to stain that top piece of cedar to match the deck (maroon), the rest will be yellow.from the street – half of the porch is done!a view from the front
Unfortunately the bathroom took SO long to demo (come on it was a TINY bathroom, we didn’t think it would take more than half a day!) that we’re a bit behind on the renovation. Plus one wall needs to come down completely and be rebuilt, these walls are just horrible. So we have to come up with a game plan to get a few things done quickly and soon.
a start on the electrical – saturday morninghard to tell but a bunch of the old plumbing and gas lines were removed (water capped in the basement). The only water in our house right now is in the downstairs bathroom running off our manifold and our washing machine in the basement!upstairs bathroom all gone. notice the old doorway – always interesting finding different layouts to the house. this is a view from the master bathrooma view from the hallway outside the bathroom. This wall is the one that we’ll take down and rebuild. It will have the washer/dryer on one side and the sink on the other side plumbing wise.
Well the painters are officially on the naughty list! They haven’t been over in more than a month, since Ryan’s paternity leave. They never finished stripping, we hired a carpenter to replace the wood they took down when they kept messing it up (and wasting tons of supplies). On top of that they never followed any of the laws with regards to lead paint removal after discussing it with them multiple times.
The bad news:
At the very very least we need to do a few things our selves, we’ve kind of given up hope after leaving multiple messages and trying to get a hold of the owner…
We have bare wood they stripped that needs primer before winter!
We have stripped wood that needs to be sanded before it can be primed, the person stripping was new and did a kind of terrible job chipping into the wood over and over!
We have new primed wood installed that needs caulk before winter!
Our new siding needs to be caulked (4 new sections)
The good news:
We only paid them a down payment of a 1/4 the amount wanted and they have done about a 1/4 of the work if you include materials purchased
We know never to hire them again!
We ended up finding a good carpenter we like for future work
So Ryan is going to spend some time Saturday doing some prep work on the porch (there’s still paint to be stripped, then it all needs to be sanded). We’re really in doubt that we could find anyone that is available next week to get primer/paint on the house! We did put out feelers to some people we know/trust to see if any painters they know happen to have a couple days available but it’s very very unlikely.
I may take a day off (monday) to caulk and do what i can (prime?) if the weather is nice. It gets cold by next thursday so we don’t have long to get this buttoned up. We’ve weathered winters with just primer before but we are trying to be better about this, surely starting at the beginning of august was not too much to ask to get this job done before winter!
That’s right – we hired someone for another project. This time we decided we really want the porch to be stripped (lead paint) and re-painted before winter so we decided to hire someone to do that work. Interestingly enough I could probably do this stripping faster if we just hired a babysitter, but the work is getting done and I don’t have to do it so bonus.
What are they doing? We are having the soffit and frieze board around the top of the porch all done, the tops of the posts (the bottoms are being rebuilt by Ryan’s Dad). The soffit and frieze along the roof line on the driveway side of the house and the shingles in the peak (those are not being stripped but just sanded and then painted). Finally the siding next to the side door is going to get stripped and painted. It’s easier to show in pictures.
Rather than strip a lot of this, they are actually just taking down the wood and replacing it, fine with us and cheaper for them.
This section of siding will be stripped and then painted green with yellow for the trim.Here you can see the posts are stripped and that upper frieze board was replaced, the piece between the posts and the top has also been stripped but needs some repair work (they are going to screw it up to secure it better than putty it up). The posts and frieze/soffit will all be yellow.The outside frieze/soffit removal is started. I believe they remove the entire thing and replace it because the moldings are all standard and easy to replace rather than strip. The carpenter is waiting for confirmation on that from the contractor so he’s waiting on that.The work up here hasn’t been started yet but they will replace and/or strip the soffit all along the roof there just like the porch. The shingles will be sanded and painted red, the soffit yellow and the molding they are going to add in will be red. There are also 2 sections that were rotted a bit so they are going to repair that up as well. The only section they aren’t touching (except to sand and paint) is the shingles and frieze around the shingles.
So that’s our house progress while we have no time to work on the house just yet. I have the shelves for the built-ins primed, ready to be painted. I also made one of the two curtains for the nursery so some progress is being made here and there. Hopefully this weekend will see more progress.
This weekend Ryan’s parents came out to the house to help out. Suzanne helped out with Alex a ton so I got a break and could get some stuff done around the house, it was a much needed break because Alex can be quite demanding. Mark worked on the posts he made for the front porch, getting half of them installed. He’s also making the railings from scratch, matching the original detail, just amazing.
front posts done and one railingand the right side posts all done!
And on Sunday Alex turned 2 months old! She’s over 9 lbs and 22 inches long now and has her doctor appointment on Tuesday (I am not looking forward to her getting shots – ugg). Here are some of my favorite shots from today.
