I'm still here

Wow, it's been a while hasn't it? I'm still drowning in half-finished projects, but I managed to finally cross two off my to-do list. For some reason I only get my butt in gear when we're going to host a party or something, but I'm happy nonetheless. The desert garden is complete. Well the hard part anyway. The massive piles of rock screening are finally gone and I was able to finish landscaping the unfinished corner. I still have more planting to do, but that will wait for fall's cooler temperatures. This ups the enjoyment factor in the backyard bigtime. Ghetto factor comes down another notch.

The contractor had added railing to the deck and replaced some warped pieces earlier this year. It had only gotten a partial finish treatment. I didn't buy enough stain/sealer at the time and so it looked so-so for most of the year. I finally built up the will to do some light sanding and a hose down prior to finishing the sealing. I think it looks pretty good too. Till next time! :)

exterior paint is done!!

I can faintly here that cheezy song "I'm too sexy.." looking at these picures. It's been way too long that I've been working to get this house to this point. When I come home I tend to cringe less and less, so I think we're getting there. Behold, the full pics here.

paint disaster averted

It seems I've had workers scurrying around my house for the past two months. Well actually, we have. First the roofers had their way with the place. A week went by and then I had the next crew come in to do misc things both inside and out. The biggest changes were to the exterior. Most obvious would be the completion of my paint scheme. The colors were decided long ago and for the most part I had a very specific style in mind. The khaki green would be the dominant color, peppered with the very intense maroon red. On my windows you've noticed I go for a red sash bordered by the green trim.

I always knew I wanted the eaves to be two toned as well. The beams were going to be red and the soffit green. See porch eaves (don't mind the red band just below). So how come it didn't look quite right? As the workers were painting one side of the house I let it stew for a few days and tried to shake it off. No, of course it's right -- how else would it be? Luckily Sherwin Williams has a paint visualizer tool on their website that lets you upload photos to try out different paint schemes using their colors. I played around with that for an hour until it finally slapped me in the face. The crown molding that intersects the row of beams needs to be painted red too. See roof eaves. Otherwise they just look kind of floaty and jarring to the eye. Well to me at least. Figuring as how I was going to live with this paint scheme for the next 20 years or more, it's best to get this done right the first time. Cost me a little extra to go back and paint the crown, but it was worth it.. Sorry I don't have any after pics yet -- they're coming. My house has looked like hell until just today -- the workers finally finished the last of this round of projects.

house numbers

So after deciding to rip open the porch beam to get to the bottom of the sagging issue, the house numbers came down as well. They initially looked fairly unremarkable, until we noticed bits of copper shining through the paint. A hardware boil and cleanup session later and we had some sweet looking copper house numbers, which as far as we know, are original.

Before:

After:

beam story continued

In a previous post I gave the back story of our initial findings on the front porch beam. Long story short, there is no massive structural beam hiding under there. Instead the weight of the roof is actually held by the porch roof joists themselves. The internal framing that spans the front fascia is a truss system. I'm sure it lends additional support, but probably not much. Thus the slight sagging was probably due to settling rather than actual structural problems like say, a cracked joist or beam. So we were safe to fix the look cosmetically instead.

In the above pic you'll notice the gap on the right side is slightly more open than the other. The reason is the roof is actually one course of brick higher on that side. Honestly it kind of bugs me now that I know it's there, but we'll just call it character. The house was built this way and it's been fine for 100 years. If it was rotting and falling apart I would have took it all down and rebuilt it level. However since all the wood is solid and in great shape this was not necessary.

Instead a level was strung end to end to get the lowest point and rebuild the fascia to accommodate the slightly lower beam line. New and old wood was then cut to size to fill in the remaining voids. When the horizontal molding is added back in, the fix should be mostly imperceptible. Hopefully.

Here's a sneak peek at our new paint scheme..

beam me up

So the plan at this point is to expose the beam on the front porch and figure out what we're dealing with. The roofers gave their ok from up top, but we didn't really know how extensive the damage would be until we tore it open from the bottom. Honestly I was kind of scared to do this and feared the worst. As luck would have it, things looked pretty good. Major sigh of relief.

The beam actually isn't really a structural beam at all. My GC called it an internal truss system, which seems to be tied into the overhead joists from the porch roof. There are even steel rods that tie in at each column and span the entire length. Ok cool. So why was it sagging? Aside from minor settling, we actually found that the height of the roof isn't in perfect alignment. One side is approximately 3" higher than the other (approximately one brick). For some reason the right side was built higher than the left. The rest of the house and foundation is level so it wouldn't make sense that it was built that way on purpose because of the slope of the street. This was probably a minor engineering error that no one really noticed until it was too late. Either the masons built one column with an extra course of bricks or the carpenters built one side of the framing too high. The jury's still out who screwed up. I don't think the sag would have been very noticeable at all if it weren't for this issue. But the fact of the matter is this roof is solid as a rock. I could jump on this thing all day and it wouldn't ever move. All the wood is solid and in very good condition so we only need to do some minor cosmetic work.

The plan is to pull off all the fascia boards and rebuild them perfectly level. I'll show how we did that next time. For now, take a look at the truss in all its exposed glory.

See those water stains? Without any flashing on the porch roof, water was trickling in and making its way down here. Now that we have proper flashing this should no longer be an issue.

porch restoration

So as I hinted at in the last post, we're getting the house painted. Let's see it's been 3 1/2 years or so since we got permission from the city to do this.. I would say I've taken my time, wouldn't you? Don't worry there's still plenty for me to do around here.. many projects lined up and in progress.

As the title of this post implies, we're restoring the front porch too. Why bother painting the front porch if it's not fixed? No, to do one job means we have to do the other. To ignore it at this point would be like putting lipstick on a pig. I've often grumbled about the sag on the porch beam, well now we're finally doing something about it. I was assured by the roofer that the beams from up top were solid and in good shape, but I needed to know what the story was from the bottom. If there was an issue, surely it would be there. The photos below highlight what my porch looked like prior to ripping it apart..

Holy cow it's been a while since the eaves have gotten some love hasn't it? Not to worry -- the love train is on it's way. :)

new top hat

Let's all take a moment to admire my new roof..

Ah yes, that feels good. The flashing over the porch is kind of prominent, but doesn't bother me too much. I don't think we had any flashing with the old roof, so this is obviously superior. We also got some flashing on the chimney stacks which was also previously non-existent. A roof vent has also made an appearance -- hopefully we can cut those summer temperatures a bit. Didn't have any of that either. It's kind of hard to appreciate the color of this shingle. It's a little darker than the old shingle. Kind of light charcoal, with brown and green-blue highlights. I think it gives a much nicer contrast than the old roof. We're hoping to get the painters out soon to complete the look. More on that later..

old roof shingles

Something kind of interesting about this roof is it still had the original wood shakes. From what I've seen around here it's still pretty common to see this as the first layer on your roof as opposed to plywood decking. Can you say "deferred maintenance"? Anywho, all this got ripped off and replaced with fresh plywood. Before it was all gone I was able to snap a few pics though. Kind of cool, but was in pretty bad shape. The house had three layers of shingle on the roof -- I could feel it just breathing easier without all that weight. Hopefully the house is happy.

my toupee!

The roofers have made quick work of the old roof. Two days of demolition and the installation of the new decking is almost complete. My house looks like a major construction zone at the moment, but it's going to be sooo worth it. Kudos to anyone who got my vague Letterman reference.. :)

top front windows done

These actually went pretty fast -- well considering how long I've dragged out some of my other windows. Slowly the house is making the transformation from a dull yellow to my snazzy new paint scheme. I'm considering switching from windows to working on the porch to help complete the look. I imagine I'll be working on that for a while if I do start that next. One thing that makes me cringe every time I look at the house is how the porch beam has a subtle but very noticeable sag in the middle. Obviously this is going to get fixed, but I don't know to what extent the damage is. If anything, it would involve pulling off the fascia boards and reinforcing/replacing the structural beam underneath. So it shouldn't damage the paint too much. I can always do touch ups after the fact. I'm hoping to get that taken care of sometime by the end of the year. Cross fingers..

prison decor is so 80s

You might remember way back in the year 2007 I rejoiced after upgrading my home from the cheesy prison look. What I mean, of course, is we removed the wrought iron bars that were on every single window of our home. A huge improvement for this house's curb appeal. If you look closely you'll see the remnants of the bars on the two top story windows over the porch.

I despised these bars the day we moved into this house 4 1/2 years ago and I despised them even more the day I removed the rest of the bars. That's because we kind of forgot about them that day and I figured I would get to removing them in a few weeks. So weeks turned into months, then years. Until yesterday that is. Behold the sad remains. Of course the last piece wasn't going down without a fight. I must have wrestled it for an hour (note bent up piece) :).

Ah yes, much better. I've already started and nearly completed step 1 of my 8 step window process. I'm hoping I can finish these in the next two weeks or so. I'm planning on getting my window guy back over here soon to resume work on another room. We'll restring these while we're at it.

are we done yet?

Yes, I think we can finally check these off yet again. I'm hopeful this time it's for good. And while I'm anxious to get started on a new view of the house with my window rehab, I think I'll take a week or two off from house projects. Then I can get cranking on these again. There's still much to do and I'm determined to get my house completely painted this year.

more progress shots

Not sure if this is worth posting, but I think it's kind of cool.. :)

coming along nicely

Ok so with the old rotted trim removed, we can finally see how it looks with some tight new wood. The right side was really bad, but the left only needed the lower half replaced. Hopefully we've fixed all the issues with this window. I think once we get it caulked and water tight it should weather very nicely.

more window damage

Let's head back outside -- that one window of the dining room trio was definitely the worst. There was a lot of rot and warpage of the wood that was still there. Over time, people had tried caulking the difference, but it just made it look like crap. We needed crisp new wood. Here you can see one side of the framing has a brick molding profile. Luckily the big boxes have this available so it wasn't too painful to fix. Check out how damaged this stuff is though.

As we pulled that off to get to the warped inner trim we found it was a 1x6 that was pretty rotted. This got yanked and replaced as well. When all is said and done this corner will look like new.

dining room window repair

Look closely. See how the bottom of the top sash is kind of wet? I took this picture about a year ago when it was raining. I didn't like what I saw. Mostly because after basking in the glory of "completing" my rear dining room windows in the fall of 2007 did I ever imagine I'd see anything like this. It's been bugging me since then -- the problem never really went away and actually got worse.

The problem was that the bottom part of this top sash had suffered so much wear and rot, that it was still kind of flexible. Over time, the thing would literally slide out of the nails holding it in. It didn't help that the thing was still kind of bowed. To compensate at the time I added a little glazing to make up the difference. Obviously this didn't work very well.

It all started innocently enough -- I wanted to put up something over the large middle window in the trio to help diffuse the intense sunlight that streams through in summer. Stained glass perhaps? Of course to do that, we'd need to pull out the glass since it wasn't seated very well. The silicone that was smeared all over the inside and outside of the framing needed to be cleaned out and sanded down before it was reinstalled flush with a new bed of silicone. And since I'm doing that why not just fix this window that never really got fixed before it deteriorates even more? And while I'm at it why not just give the whole deal a fresh coat of paint?

You can see here the glass is cracked. This was after a failed attempt at drilling in some screws into the bottom of the mullions to hold them flush. The glass was a little fragile and we had a casualty. That's ok though. I'd rather have the integrity of the wooden sash than a small pane of wavy glass.

Holy cow, look at all that caked on dirt! My guess is there were some broken panes that had let in years of dirt and rain, slowly rotting that piece of wood. In the next few entries you'll see how we hopefully solved the problem and made these windows feel as good as they look. Hopefully.

rear office windows

Oh yes, they look good don't they? Don't get too excited -- it's mostly cosmetic. Kinda like I did on the first floor they're still nonfunctional. The plan is to get all the windows in the office totally restored. We still have the other three that are in horrid shape. However that will wait a bit. Not sure if we'll do this room next as we'll completely inconvenience ourselves for a week or two while the workers shut the door and have at it. In the meantime the rear view will look purty from a distance.

But really, they're already scraped and sanded. They got reglazed too. All it'd take to call these done is to unstick them and rehang the sash chain. So they're maybe 85% done. But that'll be our little secret. There's been a lot going on around here -- most of it blog worthy. Hang tight, I have a few more updates. Stay tuned.

guest room windows, day4

More progress updates from the guest room window restoration. As you can see above, the sills needed work. This is actually a 1" strip of concrete that meets the slight incline of the sill and joins it to the wooden sill just above. I'm not sure if they meant to do it this way or they miscalculated the angles of the concrete sill when they were building the house, and fixed it with the concrete strip. Either way, these areas are definitely showing their age. I happily ignored this issue when I did the first set of windows on the rear of the house 2-3 years ago. But we obviously need a permanent solution here.

My contractor suggested yanking the ones that were falling apart and replacing with a piece of quarter round. We filled the cavity with some expanding foam to minimize drafts, caulked & painted. You can see one in progress in the below pic. Don't worry -- we're on the home stretch here. Note stain on interior sill.. :)

guest room windows, day3

Once the sash was ready to go, they were ready to be mounted back in their rightful places. They were strung back up with some new sash cord and we were finally able to have a house that didn't look like it was under construction again. With the windows in place, it was time to mill some lumber into exact reproductions of the window casing. Finally this room was starting to look like a 100 year old room again. And from the outside, the exterior framing was able to be caulked and painted. The glass needs a good cleaning from glaze residue, but they are really looking good.