And, we’re back! We’re getting ready for the trip to Argentina and Chile in a few weeks and thought we’d fire up the blog for an update.
Here’s the story on the latest house project. We desperately needed to paint the trim on the house. I suppose we could have done just that. But we also wanted to paint the body of the house. The body with the awful aluminum siding. Here’s the “before” view.
Off came the siding, revealing wood shingles beneath. They were in decent shape overall — we ended up replacing about 20%. But that was hardly it for the prep work. The roof needed some work since removing the aluminum siding exposed some gaps. The wood shingles had staples EVERYWHERE from the aluminum siding. We replaced concrete backer board around the base of the house with decking material. It’ll last forever, and can’t get water damaged.
There was also extensive repair to the front porch. Our contractor Kevin (highly recommended Portland people!) did a ton of awesome carpentry, and talked me into running some new electrical for stair lights. It’s always fun to tie into knob and tube wiring and crawl around under a porch. But, yes, Kevin was right — it was worth it.
The painters then scraped the peeling paint. Since it was likely lead paint, there was an abatement process. After weeks of prep, the primer finally started going on.
Finally, we were ready for the final coats of paint. We had debated colors for years, and blue had been the leading candidate. But we couldn’t find many blue houses where we liked the shade, and almost all of them had tired looking paint. It doesn’t seem like blue ages well. Leena noticed a bunch of big corner houses painted brown. It doesn’t sound too exciting, but the more we looked, the more we liked. And we also noticed that we preferred houses with DARK trim and a LIGHT accent color. We really had to work to convince the painters that this is what we wanted — they said that almost every house did the reverse. Sure, but it’s our house. Even then, their first pass at the accent was with the dark color. They had to redo it. Anyway, here’s a few shots of how it turned out!
