the things I miss

its history

its magnolia tree

its guest room

its dining room moulding

moving day

In December we put the big blue project on hold and moved to Denver.  We still own the house and plan to indefinitely.  We have renters looking out for it for now but we hope to use it as a vacation home later in life.

  

Last night in the house; the next day we took the 17 hour drive to Denver.

all grown

I never did take nice 'after' landscape photos with everything in bloom but after finishing up the railing I took the opportunity to snap some photos in the fall.  The flowers are gone and the leaves are starting to fall but this gives an idea of the changes we'd made over the years to the landscape.

housekeeping

Springtime always calls for exterior updates and this year we had even a few more items to tackle.  The railing on the deck needed to be replaced and the guest house (aka the playhouse) had a rotten porch.  We simply replaced the railing with new 2x4 boards and repainted to match the old ones.

Not very exciting so far but the guest house needed much more work (it really does have a door, not sure why it's always open in pictures).  The slide and balcony were made from plywood that 5 winters of peeling paint later could be punched thru. The beams under the balcony were starting to rot and mildew and the railing was seriously peeling.

We removed the slide altogether and scraped the rest of the trim and railing.

We replaced the plywood on the balcony with 2x6 planks finished with white stain and repainted everything else including the beams underneath to protect from any further damage. 

We also decided to add lattice around the bottom to hide the storage area below.  The plan is to add a planter bed at the base of the lattice and grow vines to cover it.

We had a roofer out to patch up a few spots on the house we had them replace the part of the guest house roof that had broken as well. We were ready for guests again but somehow didn't take a finished after photo so imagine the below but painted nicely, slide posts removed and a non-broken roof.

freebie

The other 'hey look what I did while you were away for the weekend Bryce' project I decided to tackle was the newel posts.  The geometric circle on squares was far too geometric 80's for our 1908 house.

We had actually added the globes as a temporary filler but I came across a better option while cleaning out the material library at work.  The new newel posts were leftover from a old project and were no longer needed which made them free to me.  I decided to remove the top wood square (I don't believe these were original to the house), added my new newel posts and repainted everything to match. 

These are still not exactly what I'd pick if I had a large range of options but they're much better and for free I'm not going to complain. 

clean up

Before putting away the painting supplies I had a weekend home alone and thought I'd tackle a few more less-necessary projects solo.  First up was the supply closet by the back door.  

The inside of this closet hadn't been touched since we moved in and since we had left over paint from the bench project I decided it was a good time to update it.  There are two poorly placed shelves at the top of the closet leaving little room for actual cleaning supplies.  I painted the inside of the closet, adding some stripes because....eh, why not?

I added a wire organizer along the rear wall to hold cleaning supplies, hooks to one side for brooms, dusters, mops etc and clear office file holders to the other for paper bags.

I used bins on the shelves to hold light bulbs, vacuum accessories, cleaning rags etc.

Room on the floor was left for the stand up vacuum cleaner which used to barely fit (the flooring in here is some old carpeting that was left when the Pergo was installed; I kinda dig it).  

kick off

As it usually does, one project led to another and while we were making trips to Home Depot to patch up the holes in the closet and kitchen ceiling, we went ahead and purchased materials for another project we'd been planning on since moving in.

This nook by the back door was great for storing shoes but the freestanding shoe rack needed upgrading.  

We started by removing the flooring (uncovering some awesome linoleum) and trim and built-in a bench of ply-wood with shelves below for shoe storage.  We left the shelf above with baskets for hats/gloves/scarves and covered the rear wall of the nook with bead board to give it a true built-in look.

  

The bench and bead board were painted Behr 'Decorator White' and finished off with some trim and the globe light was replaced.