Archive for May, 2010

Windows

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Long before we even started priming the house The Boy took a good long chunk of time to restore the rotten and decrepit window sills. He sanded, patched and primed the wood long before we decided on a house color…well, except for two. There are two windows left on the garage that haven’t gotten the restoration treatment (somewhat luckily since I never got a good “before” image of the untouched sills).

Yes, they were all this crappy.

This weekend was the first time I got to paint over the primer and check out our fully restored sills. It’s been about a year and a half long process to get to this point, but its probably been over 50 years since they were first painted. During all that time since the house was first built it seems like no one ever thought to give them a second coat of paint. There was only one thin off-white coat of paint that was just completely flaking off. Probably better than having to sand down years worth of gloppy paint jobs.

We did recently hear from a neighbor that The Brick House used to be a halfway house for a good long while. Awesome. Go Hemet!

Now what to do about those crappy aluminum windows…

FILED UNDER: after, before, exterior, windows

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Painting continued

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Still painting. Well, not in the storm. But you know what I mean.

What I thought we could tackle in a week or so (good god I was naive) looks like it may turn into a month or two of exterior painting. DAMMIT.

It’s turned out that painting under the eaves is probably the seventh circle of hell. It is the most tortuous sustained body movement with your arms above your head and your lower back / shoulders aching while looking directly into the sun (plus I got giant chunks of paint stuck in my long luxurious mousy brown hair) AND it needs two, possibly three coats of paint. So you have to keep going back to this awful quagmire of hell torture even though you know the pain will come. Oh, and it comes.

Looks like every surface, even though we primed, is going to need two to three coats of paint. The two of us are painting the whole Brick House compound not once, not twice, but three times.

Saturday, after four hours of repainting walls and painting under long stretches of eaves, I kind of lost my mind and thought “We could just hire some people to finish this. We could just give up and get some help. Painting is the devil.”

Maybe it’s a good thing that we took a break on Sunday. The poor Boy has to continue painting all week by himself while I’m at work.

We still need to re-mortar this little chunk of the brick planter. It fell apart sometime over the years and needs to be chiseled down, stacked and cemented together before we paint it up.

The stupid chimney. This is far as I could reach on top of a ladder with an extension stick on my roller. Pathetic. We need to figure out how to get some paint on there. Three coats of paint.

The Boy did finish sanding and patching the last of the fascia on Saturday as I went totally insane painting under the eaves. So that’s a plus. Now we can just repaint it over and over and over and over and over and over…

FILED UNDER: before, exterior

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Thrifty!

Monday, May 24th, 2010

I don’t know if anyone has noticed but I have gone a whole month without thrifting – which must be some sort of crazy miracle. We’ve been so consumed with prepping and painting the exterior that all that fun weekend free time evaporated into sunburns, sore backs and clumps of paint stuck in various body hair.

This Sunday there was a freak thunderstorm that rolled into Hemet that destroyed our plans to finish up painting the front of the house. I took the opportunity to break my thrifting dry spell and hit up a 50% off estate sale and a couple of thrift stores including the brand new Goodwill (Hemet’s one and only).

The estate sale was pretty much a depressing bust but I went enticed by and ended up buying this vintage spider leg table. I’m kind of clueless about where to put it in the house but was sold on the low price and elegant curves. When I pulled up to the house with my loot the Boy sarcastically stated, “Oh, another table? Yeah, we totally need some more of those.”

The new Goodwill doesn’t have a huge furniture or home wear section but I did spy this credenza for $50. It was in pretty rough shape and wasn’t super design exciting, so I passed on it even though I’ve been on the hunt for a credenza for the master bedroom.

I did pick up some ceramic pieces…of course…

I loved the graphic black etched pattern on this little pitcher. I wish it was larger – I’d totally use it too water my thirsty house plants.

I also grabbed this vintage Heath serving bowl and platter set. It’s pretty large and in fairly decent shape. Great for chips…or stew…or soup? Good for something…

FILED UNDER: ceramic, estate, furniture, hemet, thrifting, thrifty

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