Our New Old House

This summer finds us cutting lots of trees and shrubs down at both of our new old houses. In Des Moines Brandon cut down the shrubs in front of our porch. They’d overgrown the space provided and I wasn’t able to trim them back far enough to be able to use the sidewalk. I’m going to replace them with rose bushes.

Before:
(With bushes, and snow)

After:
(Bush free and summery)

We did a similar job at our house in Clear Lake. The shrubs in front of our porch there were getting dead spots and were kind of preventing us from keeping the rest of the area around the house clean, so we decided to cut them out too.

Before:

During:

After:

Obviously, we have more clean-up to do now that the bushes are gone. We’re going to dig out the stumps and clear all the weeds out, then plant some new flowers there.

In the back yard in Des Moines we’ve got a bunch of trees that were volunteer saplings many years ago and have now grown to be total pests. We’re gathering quotes this week to see what it will cost to have them removed, as well as what it will take to have the big catalpa tree between our house and the neighbor’s taken out. I’ve got a good recommendation for what kind of tree to replace it with, so that will be a big change coming up sometime.

And while I’m talking about future plans I might as well list out some other things we have coming in the (hopefully) near future.

• Reshingle the roof
• Repair the front steps
• Tear out sidewalk blocks & have a new one poured
• Paint the back wall of the house
• One more coat of paint on the rest of the house
• Build a shed on the old garage slab

Phew! That’s a long list. Better get to work then!

I have big dreams for my dining room. I love the dining room. It’s one of my favorite rooms in the house and after living in a house for a while that didn’t have a dining room I remembered how much I love them when I saw the spacious one that came with this house. I want the dining room to have a slightly more formal feel than the cozy living room and the retro kitchen. To achieve this, I’ve picked out some classic warm colors (“Bone White” and “Merlot” with gold and bronze accents.) I’ll put a strip of arabesque wallpaper where there once was a chair rail and paint the top portion of the wall Bone White and the bottom portion Merlot.

The room has the original crown molding. Sometime in the 60s or 70s, the previous owners had the room paneled and the ceiling was sprayed with popcorn. Rather than having the crown molding covered and painted or something, they just popcorned right over the crown molding.  Yup, I cringed too.

Here are some “before” pictures of the dining room.  (And that’s not a bed in the middle of the dining room, it’s my piano and dining room table bunched together with an old polyester bedspread draped over them for protection.)

Here’s a closeup of the popcorn-stricken crown molding. You can see on the left I rubbed some off with my hand. I found out that it actually comes off really easily with water.

So I scrubbed…

And scrubbed…

And finally had it clean enough to paint.

I thought about stripping the paint off and restoring the original wood underneath but I already have too many wood stripping projects that are unfinished. I decided to spare myself this one and paint the crown molding with a layered metallic technique the paint guy at Menard’s told me about.

First I put up masking tape, of course.

Dutch Boy has combinations of base colors and metallic glazes. Here are the labels of the two colors I used so if you want, you can duplicate them.

I applied the first coat of the base color. “Keoki Coffee” is a rich chocolate brown. After a couple coats of this I’d go over it with a metallic glaze with little gold flecks in it and the result would be as subtle dark bronze.

It turned out pretty good! Here’s a picture with the masking tape still on:

Check back for Part 2: more prep work!

Finally! Some photos of our kitchen looking closer than ever to being done! At least it looks clean and usable now.

Ok time for before and after!

Woo hoo!  I have my kitchen back!  We still have plans to add cabinets over the stove and fridge,  refinish and paint the existing cabinets, and actually paint the walls something other than white, but we’re getting closer!

[tags]cabinets, paint, plaster, future plans, kitchen, ceiling, light fixtures, flooring, dishwasher, drywall, refrigerator, photos[/tags]

I wanted to take a picture of this before it got painted over. The living room and dining room both had this trim around the top of the wall.

I had to do a lot of plaster work in this room. I’m particularly proud of reconstructing this corner that had crumbled away as the house settled.

Here’s a before picture:

One side of the wall over the fireplace needed some major repair:

I started attacking the gunk on the floor with a new vengeance, doing garbage bag sized sections rather than grocery bag sized ones.

Mom came over with some of my friends to help me put primer on the walls.

We bought a new rug, cleaned everything up, and arranged the furniture and here’s the result! It’s not finished, but I can see the finish line from here!

Phew! We can actually live in the living room now! Paint colors for the wall are being planned, also I’m going to restore the bookcases with leaded glass windows.

[tags] built-ins, photos, plaster, furniture, paint, future plans, ceiling fan, flooring, living room, fireplace, cabinets[/tags]

Let’s take a look at the list I made myself back in October or something.  I don’t think I’ve done very well. 

• Install gutter apron (PRIORITY ONE, ASAP) DONE!!!
• Finish landscaping wall some progress made
• Transplant hostas and ferns  not even close
• Make kindling bundles out of the sticks in the backyard  Does breaking some big sticks into smaller sticks count?
• Borrow a chainsaw and cut the logs that are too big for the wood burning stove  Found a couple friends with chainsaws!
• Finish the shed or at the very least gather all the pieces and move them inside Yeah, no. Snow covering all the pieces we left outside. 

*Sigh.*  I need a better list.