Back to painting...

Our longest ongoing project so far has been repainting the house. Not just slapping on another coat of paint, but stripping the old paint down to bare wood, then priming with a high quality oil-based primer and doing at least two coats of good latex paint. It's labor intensive and slow, but the results are excellent. This year, we're hoping to finish the project -- at least, the first and second floors. The third floor has a different type of siding, and we've agreed that it all needs to be replaced.

All that remains to be redone is the front and side of the guest room on the second floor, (you can see the front of the guest room in the picture to the right) as well as the bump out of the dining room on the first floor and the master bedroom on the second floor. Compared to the big wall we finished last year in terms of square footage, there is far less siding... but where the big wall had only three windows, the remaining walls have nine -- and all but one will need to be reframed!

It'll be a bit of work, just as always, but we've gotten pretty good at building window frames. Also, since 6 of the windows are on the second floor, and thus aren't as visible to the ground, we can use knotty red cedar for the casing. Down by the ground, we've opted to go with the clear red cedar, which carries a premium price... but without any knots, it gives a better appearance which holds up to direct inspection better.

It's always simpler when you know what you're doing.

This morning, John Gemmi stopped by to give me some advice. Our front door doesn't close quite right, and although I've reframed almost ten windows by now, a door is a totally different animal, and I wasn't really sure which way to proceed. Well, John stopped by before going to another customer's house, and we spent about 15 minutes looking at how it fit and what needed to be done, and sure enough, he made it seem very simple and straightforward!

Isn't it great how easy things can be when you know what you're doing?

Both Grace and I are very happy to work with John and his guys -- they're a great group and do the best work I've seen. That John is so willing to take a little time to stop by and help me figure out how to do some of my own work is just the icing on the cake!

Moved the electrical power supply

Hindsight is 20/20, so the saying goes.

When we did the Big Project, we had to upgrade our electrical service from 100 amp to 200 amp, which required the whole house being disconnected from the electrical supply and new, heavier wiring being run. That would have been the perfect time to relocate the power from the original location on the bumped-out section of windows by the dining room, but we didn't think of it then. No, it wasn't until well over a year later, when we were talking to our next door neighbors that Chris mentioned it would be nice to have the power moved to the other side of the house, since that's a less visible area of the house, and it would clean up the look.

Well, we thought it was a brilliant idea, but we'd already had the work done, and figured it would be prohibitively expensive. I wasn't even going to pursue it any further, but Grace suggested we have Wes Carver stop by and give us a quote. Wes came out and looked it over, and although it wasn't tremendously cheap, it was definitely doable... so we decided to have it done.

Now that it's done, we're really happy with the results. Wes's guys did a great job with the conversion, mounting a main disconnect panel in the basement and running the power line back to the existing breaker panel... and the outside of the house now looks much cleaner. From our bedroom, we used to see a power line out of each of the three windows, with loops of supply cable right outside the center window. Now, that's all gone, moved out of sight, and it looks far better. Now, we can also properly fix the siding that had been obscured by the original power lines and meter.

A side effect is that the carraige house is now without power. At some point in the future, we'll be running a trench out to the carraige house to reconnect the water, waste, and electrical, but until then, the carraige house will just be a big shed. Not too much of a problem, but I will have to set something up so I can run an extension cord back there when I need power.

It would have been better to have moved the supply lines during the start of the Big Project, but oh well... I'm sure there will be other things we wind up re-doing as well. As long as the end result is good, we'll be happy.

At long last, back to working on the house

It's been a long time since we've worked on the house in earnest - probably November. It's been far longer since I've done any updates to the blog. This past weekend, we got back to working on the house with replacing two windows and redoing some siding on the first floor.... so I'm hoping that now I'll get back to regular updates on the blog, too. I've already updated the gallery with our most recent projects, so look for the blog entries soon, too!