Painting the house

So thanks to very generous in-laws, we are back in business with some home improvements. No, nothing else from my list of 3 (windows -check!, insulation, and ducts), but still something that needed to be done.

We are painting the house!

I don't think this house has been painted in years, and really what better way to showcase our awesome windows than with a fresh coat of paint. So we picked our paint colors, purchased the paints, and started work last weekend; which means I get to blog again. We went with Behr's Nevada Sand for the house, Aristocrat Ivory for the doors and trim, and Hillside View for the accent color. I would love to show you a picture like I did for the interior colors, but for the life of me I can't figure out how I did that.

In the meantime we are scraping off the old paint and priming the house. There's only one issue with doing this ourselves....neither of us are over 5'5" and our ladder isn't tall enough to get us to the top of the house, so looks like we either give our tall friends and family a call to help us out, or we buy a new ladder. We'll see which we break down and do first.

You can see on this first primed wall we did, that the peak of the wall isn't yet primed...this would be due to the height issue I mentioned :) You also should notice that the window is not snazzy and new. That would be because this is the garage wall and neither of us wanted to pay an arm and a leg for a garage window. So that window stayed the old crank kind, and we'll replace it with something else at a later time.


This is the wall that surrounds the front of the house. We started scraping the paint off of that so we can get those started too. I figure it won't take too much time so we might as well start it...plus, no height issue here.

We haven't gotten much further than a few walls primed and some paint scraped at this point, but it's a start and that's exciting. We still have to seal up some cracks and repair some window sills that have seen better days. Plus we're taking down the railing that is around the front stairs, so that will be a job and a half. I think this will keep us busy for at least the next month and a half as we work on weekends and try to beat the rainy season in June. Fingers crossed that we get done before June...eeek. I'll keep posting as we make progress with the painting, but I did want to share another project that we might get started on this year.

When we purchased the house, it came with this really great wooden deck that needed some boards replaced and a little TLC. Sadly, we never did any of this and now the deck is in such a state that it just needs to come down. So we talked for a while about replacing the deck, but it would really require some money and tools we don't yet own to get that done. Then we saw in Better Homes and Gardens an idea to create a tile deck, and decided that would be perfect. A much easier DIY job and it would really open up the back yard since the wood deck sort of takes over.

So here is the deck looking toward the house from the back yard, and you can see some of the new windows and the new door we got put in. You can probably see some of the issues with warping and rotting from here.

Here is the floor of the deck in one of the worst areas for rotting. It's actually the floor right under that row of three windows you see in the first deck picture. When the window guys came to install the windows, the one standing outside nearly fell through this part of the deck. Actually one of these holes was made by him, poor guy.

And here is the deck as looking out into the back yard; complete with black cat and all. Anyways, you can see more rot here too. It's a mess.

So we're thinking if we tear down the deck, and then tile the concrete slab that's underneath the wood deck we'll really make that back yard start to look nice. Plus then we'd have a great view of the fire place. That's right, we have an outdoor fireplace. I can't wait to lay some more pavers around that and then set up some seating so we can have friends over to enjoy a fire and some wine. Good thing this probably won't happen till fall cause there is no way anyone is going to want to sit near flame any time soon as we continue to heat up down here. Oh and my apologies for the sideways picture, I can't figure out how to flip it to the right way up. Hmmm....