Facelift

Miracles do happen! We have had the trim (and screens, and doors) that were sorely in need of boatloads of care, fixed and repainted! After only x-number of years of wifely nagging!

But doesn't it look lovely now?! And it's functional, too. All the windows have screens with only the tiny holes they're designed to have, and not gaping openings that made having them essentially superfluous.

guests in our guest room (above) can actually
open their windows now!

We have friends at a local architecture/remodeling firm to thank for the handsome color scheme. And the same wonderful crew of workers who (can it be?) 10 years ago redid most of the interior of the house proved just as skillful and diligent with the outside.

One of the biggest portions of this latest job was the garage, that not only needed to be painted to match our smart new color palette, but which also needed a bunch of rotten wood replaced...

Ditto with the utility room...

Of course, there are always complications that are unforeseen at the beginning of such a job, but which we think were eventually solved beautifully. Like, how do we paint the decorative metal work on the back porch doors? We decided on making them the "pop" color:

Longtime readers (not to mention visitors to our house) will know that we've had a lot of egregiously-deferred-maintenance issues on the exterior, and I tried to find some examples in old blog posts, but stopped looking with this one. Yes, we had squirrels living behind our fascia, and why not, when the wood was so rotten they didn't even have to wear down their little rodent teeth to get in? (You can compare the picture just below with the comical appearance of the (admittedly, effective) repair work done six—yes, six— years ago...yes, we had that red board up on our fascia for SIX YEARS.)

So, the little monsters (rodents of various kinds) will have a considerably more difficult time working their way into Henry and Kathy's house now! And we don't feel quite so embarrassed by the haunted house vibe that we've been giving off all these years.