Outside

Outside

Before	After being painted

The outside of the house needs about as much work as the inside (quite a bit then). We were very aware when we bought the old place that it would need a lick of paint this summer. We are getting quotes from painters now (as neither of us want to spend every free moment scraping and priming and painting). As you can see in the picture, the windows aren't great either.

The side porch is great, with just a little work on the ceiling needed and some gardening (and hacking) to remove the bushes and to plant some flowers. The back porch on the other hand is a bit of a disaster that we are going to have to rebuild from scratch. In the process we will make it look attractive, have stairs that are less steep and add a deck. But not till next year.

The back yard has a lot of potential, but has been a little neglected. We need to remove a few invaders - bamboo, weeds, moss, a lot of vines, some box elder seedlings and (expensively) a 40ft box elder that leans at a 45 degree angle and shades the yard for most of the afternoon. Then we can tidy up the stone wall and plant lots of flowers and some hardy shrubs (zone 4A... see further down for proof - photo taken in mid March)

	The painter we pick will have an easy job scarping... only light brushing needed to remove most of the paint really. With the onset of Spring (2005), Colin decided it was time for the evergreens to go.



When the snow finally melted we occasionally escaped the dust of insulation and plaster and worked outside. Alyssa filled many garbage bags with weeds. Colin chopped down some small trees, and we got rid of that dodgy box elder. Alyssa and her Dad hauled tree and other debris away in her Dad's huge Ford F-250. His truck also came in handy getting rid of the basketball net and some more evergreens. The most dramatic change came of course with the painting of the house.

Our old iron railing had rusted and fallen apart. Plus it just didn't fit the house. We let Dad out of the basement to do a fun project. We love the new banisters. Aaron said that it was as if our house was stretching out it's arms to welcome people in. We bought the railing from Vermont Salvage and Dad created the rest.

When Dad came back in the spring (2006), he helped up install the Windows we bought from Marvin. They are more true to the original size and fit much better with the trim. And they actually close! Below the picture of Dad being goofy, you can see Dad having fun re-sizing the back kitchen window. The strange thing is, that back wall is only three inches thick. (You can also see that we have also become true New Englanders with our old appliances out on the back porch.)


Our front door looked very nice from a distance. When we looked at the house, Alyssa liked the front door. It looked a lot better when we painted the door red. But the door had this odd plastic molding at the side and an odd plastic dentil molding across the top. Our second Halloween in the house, one of the old homeowners (the Kent's, which we knew because they had engraved their name on the brass doorknocker) came trick-or-treating. Mrs. Kent lovingly stroked the plastic molding and sighed, "I remember when we put these here to cover up the broken glass." We wanted to rip the trim off right then there to see what was underneath, but seeing that is was late October, we waited. (see pictures from the front hall) So here is our new door with the sidelights.

We had looked at buying new sidelights, but the narrowest sidelights we could buy were still two inches too wide. So Dad created his own. We bought the glass and Dad designed and built the sidelights. They look better than anything we saw in the catalogues and are more true to the original ones the house probably had. And now we found a place for our house numbers. Thanks Dad!

And what happened to our old front door? It now graces the basement bulkhead. The window actually is great for brightening up the basement. We continued on replacing windows. The large kitchen windows we replaced from the outside, taking off the old trim. The fun part is putting it back on again...

In between hanging drywall and spending countless hours looking at mouldings, we have manage to spend some time working out in the garden. We built a front bed using native stone. We spent our seventh wedding anniversary planting a garden along our property line with our neighbor, Judith.