Facelift

This past weekend's Sunday project was a quick face lift on the main facade of the porch. Even though we are making a lot of progress, the front of the house still looked pretty shabby as the photos show.

East Porch before.

Front Entrance before.

The paint was peeling of in a number of places, and the old traces of the former ivy infestation were all to visible from the street. A couple of hours and a gallon of paint later, and the results speak for themselves:

Front Entrance After.

Now it looks nice and CRISP. I replaced the old tiny brass house numbers that were BARELY visible from the street with more distinctive 5" numbers that are easy to see and make a statement. 

Front view after.

I also put out the window box planters and hung the hanging baskets that were brought over from the old house. They're a little small scale wise at this point, but as the baskets fill out over the next few months they'll look more like they belong. 

I still have a few more days of scraping and painting to get the rest of the trim polished up, but all in all a very satisfying day.

Plum Perfect - Follow up

A bit later than I anticipated, but here's a snap of the "new look" for the dining room.

Dining Room

Still need to rehab the floor and do one more coat of the purple and retouch the ceiling medallion, but making progress! Definitely an improvement don't you think!

Rest For The Weary

I just realized that somehow two weeks have already gone by without an update on progress. While it has been a bit slower that I may have liked, there are definitely signs of progress. After the initial clean up it was time to lay out a game plan to tackle the rest of the project. What's that old saying about eating the elephant??

With so many things clamoring for attention I decided that the first priority for me would be to tackle the master bath and two upstairs bedrooms that will be getting new flooring installed. It obviously made the most sense to the walls taken care of before the brand new bamboo flooring goes in. Especially since doing so meant HOURS of scraping, patching, sanding, caulking, and finally painting. First up was the master bedroom.

This is what we started with... a plethora of peeling purple pansies... (Try saying that 10 times fast). They gave the room a distinctively grandmotherly feeling and therefore they HAD to go. 

The first step of course was the removal of the wall paper, which in this case ended up not being such a big deal. Everything came down fairly easily. There were only a few areas that gave me some trouble. Basically at some point sections of the paper must have started peeling away from the wall and so someone used some sort of mystery glue to attempt to re-adhere the paper to the wall. I scraped and sanded and scraped and sanded, and absolutely nothing would get rid of the glue lines. In the end I had to just do a thin skim coat of patching plaster over the affected areas and feather that out so that it wasn't all that noticeable. Luckily most of those areas are WAY up high on the wall, and I doubt that they'll be too noticeable once everything else is finished  up.

Here are a few shots of the progression from last weekend:

< Walls striped and sanded

Walls primed >

Walls Base Coated

We're planning on a faux finish for this room, so there's one more LABOR INTENSIVE coat to go... but it should look pretty good once things are finished up. Once I get the master bath and the guest room painted I'll be back over here to do the trim. I figured that's something I can safely do after the floors go in if I need to.