House in the Works—Deck Re-do

It took me about a whole day of playing with like 100 paint cards, holding them against the house in the bright sun part of the day, in the shadowed areas, up against the gutters, the outbuildings, etc., and finally I weeded them down to what I thought would look good around here.

 

A Fall Rainbow, if you will.

And our new shingles were called Autumn Blend.  See the connection?

The porch colors, basically a dark red and dark brown, were already picked and painted so those set the initial scheme.  Plus, that our house and fences are still Fake Cedar Orange made it so it had to be in there. 

Finally, that decision of the general color scheme was made, but then I was really struggling to decide what exactly to do for the deck out of these choices.  ‘Cause you know the screen porch which is now red and brown connects to the deck and then when we paint the whole house a new color… blah blah.  After whining about it maybe one time too many, Gary took it upon himself to politely choose for me which amounted to a random pointing to a this and a that.  And then there was no more discussion.  We went to town to get the paint/stain needed in the colors he had so thoughtfully pointed to, and I went to town getting this deck re-do party started.

When we were looking at this farm and considering buying it, it appeared everything was so nicely painted.  Yes, it was Fake Cedar Orange, but still it was a nice, new looking finish.  See what it was like a year ago June? 

Well, introduce one long snowy, icy winter and some other factor that I don’t really know about (watered down paint? wrong kind of stain?  improper prep?), and most of that stain was practically gone from all the deck flooring by the time spring came around.  Throw in a huge dog with huge claws living on this deck (despite the doggie condo sitting there nicely in the yard), and our deck was embarrassingly in need of serious work this whole summer: 

  

Yucky deck.  So we replaced a couple bad boards and I went over the whole thing with the power washer a couple of times and then applied a deck prep solution.  Then it was ready for stain!

 

So Gary’s dictate was for this:

And it turned out like this: 

   

This big wooden table is going but since Gary couldn’t lift for so many weeks, it’s stayed put and I basically painted around it.  I do love my new tablecloth.  Thanks, Mom!

 

It was so hard to stop since the paint was making such a huge improvement, but painting the rest of the fence and house will have to come next year.

And look at these gates!  We Scooter-proofed.

 

The design basically came out of a combination of what would add structural strength to the gate and what Scooter could not fit his head through.

I absolutely love them.  Except for the finicky latches… but the Scooter-proof part, I love them!

   

Unfortunately, Bob/Bruce did not get the stay off the deck memo. 

You know…confession time… I still do not know one cat from the other after more than a year, and Caroline just told me this one pictured is Bruce.  The only names I call them are Bobrooska or KitKit so I figure I’m covered.

Once I got going, I had second thoughts about such a light color for the floor boards, but I’d already put on two coats of the solid-color stain and I don’t think there is much more you can do to get rid of it other than to completely strip the stain (not me), so we will live with it and see how it fares.  It’s so light that it shows every little grain of shingle coating that comes down off the new roof, not to mention all the bits of dirt and tree debris.  I guess I will just keep the broom in hand. 

I don’t have that much other stuff to do.

The one upside of the floor color is now you can’t see the dog hair.  But he’s banned from the deck now anyway.  Btw, boy, was he hatin me for awhile. 

 

Headline:  Dog Gets the Boot

Family Takes Back Their Deck

I like it much better this way.

House in the Works—New Roof, Finally

We moved into this place Memorial Weekend 2010.  A terrible hail storm happened June 15, 2010.  I heard it was 2 1/4 inch hail stones.  Big!  We were out of town at the parents for the weekend so we didn’t witness it.  And once we got home, no damage was visible.

Well, fast forward about four months past that and we found out from our former neighbor that every house on our street at the Walton House was getting their roof replaced due to the hail damage from that storm.  We had a contractor come out and take a look and also asked him to take a look at our Rosie house.  We didn’t really think there was damage, but some of our neighbors in the Rosie neighborhood were getting new roofs, so maybe we should have it looked at. 

Oh yeah, we ended up needing one at the Rosie house, but not the Walton.  Maybe the damage at Walton was limited since we had just replaced the older half of the Walton house roof in May 2010, and yes, out of pocket as luck would have it.  Of course.

Well, we had quite a run-around getting things lined up between the contractor and State Farm with disputes over what type of shingles the original roof had and them being heavier, more expensive than the typical shingle and on and on, but finally fifteen months after the storm, we got a new roof.

   

A crew of siete was here for fourteen hours one 100 degree August day and a few more hours the next day to finish up.  The pitch is super steep, it was blazingly hot, but they got it done and I think it looks good. 

And I was the sole color picker on that one.  Autumn Blend, the shingle was called.  Tune in next time to see just how serendipitous that choice was.

House in the Works—Beginning with the Screen Porch

It was the first thing we’ve really done here at our new place, and by new, I mean we’ve lived here well over a year.  Until we sold our other house, though, we just didn’t feel we could jump whole-heartedly into any big projects here.  Heck, I didn’t even do any small projects, like painting walls, because it felt like everything hinged on making big future decisions about an addition which we were waiting to do until the other place sold, and I saw no point in painting the living room when it is possibly going to become dining room and then what color would I even want? 

We’ve kept the original Magic Eye wallpaper, the ceiling–level corner shelf thing (??), and the fancy

chandies as is this whole time.  So basically everything, but just living in it as it was the day we moved in as seen here, was on hold.  Until now.  Yippee!  Walton House sold, permission granted to progress.

The screen porch is a great area for us to spill over out of our tiny house for additional space.  When the weather is nice, it is nice.  I’d go as far as to say nearly ideal—the only thing is I just wish it was bigger.  Anywho, it was painted the same ol’ same ol’ that practically every other exterior surface on this whole farm was painted, and that is this color I not so warmly refer to as Fake Cedar Orange.

Since this back porch door is essentially our main door to the house, for both us and company, the porch floor gets lots of traffic.  That floor looked dirty

 

no matter how thoroughly I scrubbed it, so new paint had to happen.  I already had some porch floor paint around here that I had picked up as a bargain at Wal some time ago called Tile Red.  I decided to just go with that since it was handy the day I got a bug to start painting.  Our steps outside that you can see above were looking really rough, so I started with those.  At first stroke, I thought Oh no!  This is going to be a mistake.  My Tile Red was going on as Lipstick Pink.

Once it dried, though, and the kids came home from school and said, “Hey, Mom, you painted red?!,” I knew it was ok, in fact, maybe a good color choice.   Gary actually complimented me on the color.  Winning! and I didn’t even pore over paint chips and specifically choose it, so there you go.

Once I had the floor and doors red, I could totally visualize the trim in a dark brown. I got some Walnut Bark mixed up at Home Depot and painted the three sides of the tiny vertical slats of trim with a kids’ paint set paint brush and that took about forever.

After, see how the slats kinda just blend now?:

    

 

I wasn’t planning to paint this originally-exterior wall that the porch was built onto, with the lovely electric meter and telephone box as part of the wall decor, but you know how once you start these projects, all the old stuff looks even worse?  So I painted the wall with my trim color brown, including even the under-venting from the pre-porch house roof.  The only thing I didn’t paint was the porch ceiling itself which is of raw lumber and maybe I should have.  But I didn’t. 

I did scrub down all the screens inside and out and wow, those held a surprising amount of dirt.  It just looks so much better all the way around.  Nothing like having clear views!

And can I tell you, I have not yet been struck down dead for painting over the permanently mounted Ten Commandments plaque left by the previous owners  and removing the Jesus on a crucifix hanging over this door.  Now I’m still gonna do something creative with that little corner there, something beyond adding my tin star that says Howdy.

 

You might want to just glance quickly or you may get caught up in the Magic Eye wall.  Or get blinded by the glowing fancy chandy.

  

So, now I am loving the porch now even more than ever and I already loved it while it was Fake Cedar Orange and dingy as all get out.  Adding on the screen porch has to be one of the few smart moves ever done on this house, and, unfortunately, we haven’t found many others. 

Next:  roof and deck re-do.

MusicMonday—Que Lio

Hey, I have a new favorite song.  It’s been our cool down song at Zumba lately and every time I’ve been hearing it, it has just got under my skin more and more.  Last week, I tried to find what it even was called using Sound Hound on my phone, but it couldn’t pick it up well enough in the huge room, I guess, so no success.  Then out in the van, I actually sang in the one phrase I knew from it ~“ayudame”~ and SoundHound right away produced a song title.  Cool!  The resulting song was called “Corazon” and immediately I found it and played it, and quickly realized, nope, it was not the right song.  Apparently, ayudame, Spanish for help me as all of us age-of-Dora parents would know, is not that rare of a lyric.  So then last Friday I simply walked up to the best Zumba teacher in the world, Heather, to ask what it was called and she said some phrase in Spanish that I didn’t quite catch, but it helped that she added the song was a remake by Marc Anthony and from the soundtrack of El Cantante.  With that info, I found my song.  The movie came out in 2007 with Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez as the main characters in a life story of Hector Lavoe, then man who started the salsa movement in 1975 and brought it to the United States.

This is all so déjà vu.  Even more, it is almost exactly a year ago that it happened last time. 

I am not a fan of Marc Anthony and, not to sound judgmental, but I could never quite understand JLo’s attraction to him or figure just who would buy his line at Kohl’s, but this song…well, it like it a bunch.  I listened to the original by Hector, also, and yeah, Marc’s version of “Que Lio” is the one.  

Good Morning

Yea today

First off, I started my day with a new pair of contacts in, so that made it already a special day.  I didn't realize just how much I needed to swap them out until I noticed how great the leaves were looking on the way to the bus stop.  New contacts make the overall day so much brighter.

Then, since today was a free day for me--finally-- I got into town this morning and got a hair cut; the last time was in July so I was def overdue.  And the thing is, it's pretty much the same length as when I went in (so no need to panic, Gar), only now it's shaped up and a far better color, pretty much a match to my natural color all over. Such a relief to get my summer beachy-bleachy highlights covered and the old ends off.  Then I popped into Kohls to do a return, got a Philly at Arby's, and am now about to go mow the pasture which crazily enough makes me really happy. Gotta say, it's a great day!

And btw, everything's cool with us.  I just haven't had a chance to blog and besides that, we are out of bandwidth for the month so that's why the phone post today.  Come this weekend, though, we will be back to fully charged on the home 'puter so I'll post what all's been happening at our house.

MusicMonday--Eskimo

It’s Monday and I’m thinking of my favorite song, at least my favorite at this point in time, say for the past two weeks.  It’s a great one because it’s older Chilis (w/ John and that equals musical genius) and kinda mysterious because you can not buy it on iTunes and it is definitely not in the popular rotation on the radio.  It was a b-side to Fortune Faded (2003).  B-side, now that’s something you don’t much hear anymore.   

I love it and my only way of hearing it is on YouTube. Here, I’ll share with you.

Fun Day

Yesterday I woke up with a plan to go do something fun, just the littles and me, since the big boys were off camping.  Some of us had to be convinced it would be more fun than they were already having on Saturday morning:

Once convinced, we hopped in the:

It was a beautiful, perfect day weather-wise, but still some dressed like:

 

Along the way, we were amused by:

Until we sat in gridlock with our final destination in sight:

 

But first, we were hungry for lunch, so we went here on The Landing where they specialize in aged pasta production:

And I learned I do not specialize in phone photography:

And Caroline was looking all:

And by now, Sam was a happier camper, um, biker:

Then we made it to the:

 

It was the first time for these two, that they could remember anyway:

 

Seems as though Sam lost his neck while looking up:

And this is what happens when you are under it at 1:20 p.m.:

 

Sam was hesitant about the ride up, but did fine and we looked for our house on this side:

Excitement included seeing this, don’t know what it was—some building, but it was a big, unusual thing to be seeing on the river:

We did not, however, catch the elephant show.

[Back story:  For years, Gary has had (or at least has tried to have) Caroline thinking helicopters drop elephants down to the top of the Arch.]

Then we were walking around on the beautiful Arch grounds when I asked Caroline to stop for a picture and she instantly posed like this high school senior:

 

Girl likes the camera, for sure.  More playing around:

  

And then they walked on hand-in-hand like the sweetest brother/sister duo in the world and it totally melted this mom’s heart:

Great day, St. Louis!