First Impressions.

Eventually, one day, we would like for our house to make a good first impression. Right now, it says "Ew, good thing no one lives there". If you will recall, the house looked like this when we bought it.

We did a bit of demo and removed the storm door and surrounding frame and then propped our new old double doors in place.

We are finally moving forward towards what we consider the first real improvement to the front of the house and plan to have the doors installed soon. Before they go in there are a few decisions to be made. Things we, of course, have been thinking about for months and months. So, similar to past moments of indecision, we are hoping someone out there might weigh in. Help us out. Pick one already! This is what we've got.

Hardware? I think we have narrowed it down to these two single cylinder mortise locks. The finish is oil rubbed bronze, which to my understanding should age over time. The differences between the two are thrilling, I know, but that's what we've got. #1 Baltimore. #2 Reading.



Ok, I admit it. The decision is not that easy. You see, we have been planning to sand these doors down and stain them. It seems this could be quite a difficult undertaking. When the new hardware is installed it will actually need to be raised slightly so that bending down to open the door will not be required. That's only a mild exaggeration, it's pretty low. So, to do this, the old mortise hole will be filled in and the new one moved up. Apparently making the patch look good enough to stain nicely is a job for a skilled cabinet maker. Which we are not. Yet. Ha. Then on top of that, apparently the application of marine varnish can be tricky. Sooooo, do we just paint the door? Or maybe paint the outside and stain the inside?

Other things to factor in would be that we plan to do the landing in mahogany similar to this:

And as of today the plan is to reside the house using Hardieplank, in this color:


The trim color is TBD.

So, if we paint the door, what color do we go with? And yes, I do realize I'm not giving any options...because I have no clue. I guess a trip for some swatches is in order? Still. Help! Blue? Red? Green? Yellow?

On the Roof

We spent a rather icky Sunday on the roof and (hopefully) managed to properly seal the holes above the old drop pipe and where one of the chimneys used to be. I forgot to get pictures before we removed the remaining chimney above the roof level! Sorry! A little information: it was not capped (open to the sky) so it was raining down the chimney. Some of the bricks were completely turned to dust, which explains why we were seeing water damage in the celing around the area. Basically once I finally got the nerve to get up there my decision to remove the chimney was confirmed. It is in bad shape. Our contractor told us how to patch the areas up and said they should be fine until next year when we plan on re-roofing. I hope he is right.
This is the view of an old school (soon to be new condos) from our roof. I took more pictures, but because of the crummy weather they all looked pretty depressing. I will try to get new pics on a prettier day to share.

We took the chimney down as far as we could reach and will remove the rest from below. Cross your fingers for us that the joist and sill are not too damaged.

We pulled off as much of the lead flashing and roofing goo and made the opening as level as possible.

The weapons.

DIY amateur method: goop as much roofing adhesive onto the surrounding area as you feel necessary, spread "flashmaster" on the wood, then put the wood over the hole (flashmaster side down).

Our contractor nicely brought us a piece of ice and water to use. We decided to use it on the chimney since the drop pipe cover will still need to be cut for the new pipe (and then properly flashed).

Then We flashmastered the edges. I had a lot of fun with that stuff...it was like icing a cake, without the tasty aftermath.

I obviously didn't feel like taking any step by steps of the drop pipe cover action. Maybe because it was drizzle raining off and on by that point? Maybe because I had to send P back to the HD for more flashmaster? Maybe because I had managed to flashmaster my glove to the the trowel? Oh well, here's the finished product.

Here's hoping it holds for the snowy season.

ps. Make all attempts not to get flashmaster on your skin. That stuff is hard to get off! I may or may not have just found another small black spot on my forearm.

An Entry Mock-up.

Hello there! After a very long weekend spent trying to take advantage of the state tax holiday and going on long day trips I decided that I wanted to fake some house progress. Behold...entry doors! We got home Sunday night, took the cooped up pups on a walk and as usual spent the whole walk commenting on various entries around the 'hood. So, after the walk I decided I wanted to prop the doors in our newly hacked up vestibule. Here it is! The original plan was to replace the glass in the doors with a taller, tempered glass pieces (extending up to the top recess) and to build a transom above the door. After looking at it we are thinking it looks pretty nice the way it is. I think keeping the smaller glass cutouts on the doors will be more true to the scale of our little dog house. The doors will still be refinished, stained, get new hardware and new tempered glass. The vestibule will get sanded, patched and painted. So it will all get shined up quite a bit. Tons more work to do, but it is fun seeing the mock-up! What do y'all think? Anyone?

P the Destroyer

Given that P has asked me twice today when I am going to post the pics from this weekend, I would say he is excited about what he did. Late Sunday afternoon, after skunkfest 2010 was coming to a close, I nonchalantly remarked that we could probably go ahead and take out the front "screen" door...since we were planning on doing it anyway. I kid you not, P stood up and said "ok, let me just get my crowbar". I think he really likes tearing stuff down? So there you have it, at 5 pm Sunday evening we set about opening up our entry "vestibule". I helped a little, but mostly stayed inside scraping away at the remaining stretch of some awful, nasty, yucky paper backing that was under the linoleum in the hallway. I'm not even close to being finished, so pics on that will come later.

One last glamour shot of that sweet storm door.

Porky hangs his head in shame. "I'm sowwy for gettin' skunked dad".

Storm door off, window taken down, trim removed.

RG&CS 4-eva.

Bam! Done! Well, done taking it apart. Now we need to replace the subfloor, sand, patch, replace trim, paint, install new entry doors...just for starters. There is clearly, much, much more work to be done.

The pups like it.

Apparently the front door was not enough...another offhanded comment and more rotting wood was pulled off the house. Works for me...bye bye yucky wood.

A New Entry!

It just feels like there is never enough time in the weekend. Lately I have been waking up Saturday morning super pumped to accomplish everything on my long "to do list" only to burn out by three o'clock in the afternoon. This past weekend was no exception, but I do feel like we got a lot accomplished considering! That being said, I would like to reveal our new front doors!!!

We are so excited about these! P even said it is his favorite house purchase yet...and that is saying A LOT considering how excited he got about the $50 IKEA couch. So these doors need to be refinished, but were in so much better shape than the ones I posted about before we went to Nor'east Architectural Salvage. When we got there we realized that the other doors had about 8 (million) layers of paint on one side and some pretty serious cracking. These pretty little gems were sitting about 5 feet away just waiting to be discovered (and were priced cheaper too!). They are a little shorter than the other ones, which I think will be better for the scale of the house. We are now considering putting a transom over the door. It would allow even more light in (yay!) and there was one there originally and has since been covered by wood, paint, paneling, etc. Bring the entry back to it's former glory? Yes please! So our plans for this little beauty are: sand, refinish, cut out the top wood light to create one large glass light in each door, replace glass with new tempered glass, restore/replace hardware. Done.

Post about our Sunday adventure coming soon!

ps. Don't mind the nasty torn up linolum flooring...it will soon be gone.

How much is too much?

Scratch that, we are going here this Saturday! We found (online) what we think could be our perfect new front doors!

They are the right size, the right look, and I think after some TLC they could be really great! The problem? They are priced a little higher than I was expecting. I mean, the front door is the first thing you see when you enter the house. It's the house's "first impression". So far our house is making a very bad impression. Front doors could change that. Right? I think they are worth it. Maybe they will haggle. :)

Can't you just see it with one of these!