This post fulfills the claim made on the sidebar — that we wanted a place to show each other our doings. We're now spreading apart and getting even further away. I don't even want to know if there is somewhere further than Hong Kong that Nick and Natasha could go to!
So pictures on the blog it is.
For several years now, among all the other projects, we've been working on the outside of the house, getting it painted.
Here's how our house looked four years ago, and pretty much the way it looked when we moved in, 11 years ago. (Well, no, the brush is worse, because we didn't really know that if you don't fight mightily against it, brush will take over. We were suburbanites. We knew very little, in fact.)
{Before.}
Note the “real front” of the house, as we call it. It's there on the right. We never go there. (We just always use the door in the porch. Even when we have guests.)
You can't really see it because of the intense brush/vine/bramble thing going on in front of a positively gigantic row of Norway spruces. Those trees belong to our neighbors, so there is nothing we can do about them, nor could we afford to, I think, if they were ours.
All I can say is that if you have a nice little fir hedge, try to make sure it stays that way.
Gray…and you know how I feel about gray. If you're somewhat prone to melancholy and live somewhere that experiences an average of 90 sunny days a year, stay away from gray.
It's a mental health issue.
We started back here, below, because there was a lot of siding repair needed.
A couple of hard-working lads did their best. These two walls facing the deck are the equivalent of some houses' entire exterior.
Ah, a magic moment before the ice storm of 2008 that required a tree-felling that ruined the lawn, such as it was. In the very left of the picture you can see that we confined ourselves to these two sides.
The following year Will sacrificed some flesh (and many hours in the ER for shots) to a rabid bat to tackle the front, on which many of us also labored.
I did the porch. But not the front door. Maybe next month.
And then I was tired of painting, and really, just too old.
Last year we had a wedding (well, we had two weddings, but one here). There was no way that we could have done any exterior painting — both because of all the other projects and the truly phenomenal amount of rain we had — but we found a pro for the front hall who is reasonable and does wonderful repair work before he starts, which has always been my paralyzing worry when it comes to painters.
It's not like here, chez Lawler, you dip in your brush and go. There's rotten wood, broken plaster, leaks, caulking…
There is always so much prep work that you end up in rehab gridlock.
But Walter is amazing.
So this year we bit the bullet and hired him to finish up the eighty-twelve other sides of our house, including third-floor dormers.
The “real front” faces those trees and brush, remember? That means it's damp and dirty.
I couldn't imagine how we were going to rescue it.
Someday we will repair the front bricks…but this is already much better!
Now we just had to confront the landscape! I think by now you see the slow and incremental nature of our approach. We try to do things ourselves until energy runs out. We do not achieve closure at any point…
It does seem that if we need professional help, the means (in other words, $$) do appear. But it's not a question of writing checks and getting everything perfect.
Right now we had to hack through the jungle, cut branches, and reclaim some land.
{Way before.}
{Just as the men began pulling out the brush and trees that had grown up there.}
Not done by a long shot (we need many loads of woodchips, and soon we will begin work getting that asphalt out from the front of the house), but, like Glencora Palliser, growing upwards toward the light! And air!
{On an amusing and slightly dismaying note, four friends have visited in broad daylight and didn't notice any change, despite driving up and even parking on that side. Not only did this work loom over our poor incompetent heads for a decade and cost us a bundle, but the day of hacking was one fraught with anxiety and mind-numbing noise.
Oh well.}
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