Exterior Makeover in Progress

When we bought the house five years ago, we did a lot much in terms of fixing up the interior of the house (painted all the rooms, laid new carpet), but nearly nothing to the exterior. It's finally time, for some practical as well as aesthetic reasons.

• In terms of the practical, quite a few of the storm windows had rotten wood and we weren't sure whether the wood of the actual windows (under the storms) was rotten, too.
• Another practical point: plenty of the screens -- especially on the front porch, where they're a necessity for enjoying that part of the house without bugs -- were rusted or had holes in them.
• In terms of the aesthetics, the stucco is a bit dingy, and the off-white trim alongside the off-white stucco is soooo boring, as evidenced below.

So over the past few weeks, we've done things here and there to lay the groundword for really re-doing the windows and trim. (Dingy or not, the stucco will have to wait -- it's about a $15,000 investment. That would finance several trips to Europe, which we'd rather do than worry about the stucco right now.) Ron and M discussed how to handle the rotting wood on the storms, we took the screens to the hardware store to get them re-done, and M and Tim took down various storms.

We discussed new color (yay! After years of living in white apartments, I get so excited about adding color to the house) for the trim, and settled on the idea of black trim (hoping the contrast with the off-white stucco will make it look a little less dingy) and red doors. I think I originally got the idea from a house featured in one of my gardening magazines, but the color scheme is illustrated nicely by the weird little shed below.

So, Saturday morning, I picked up the paint from Home Depot (had a horrible retail experience -- more on that later) and we got right to it. M handled most of the scraping/sanding of old crackled paint and I followed behind with primer. When it came time to paint, we decided that I'd do the "cut-in" (the outlining) with the black because my hands are smaller and could more easily get into the crevices around the windows without making a big mess.

We moved at a snail's pace on Saturday -- it takes a while to get into the swing of these projects, plus you have to be pretty careful when using black paint against a white background. The kitchen windows took me a couple of hours just to cut in. We gave up around 7:30 p.m. -- still plenty of daylight but we were exhausted.

Up at 8:00 a.m. the next morning (great weather and a wonderful temperature for being outside), we knocked out the second coats on the side windows pretty quickly. M went in search of a taller extension ladder than the one we had, while I started working on cutting in the back windows. (Sooo glad we started with the side windows -- which are much less visible than the front or the back-- because I felt like I knew what I was doing by the time we got to the back.)

Here's the cut-in in progress:

And the finished product around 6:00 p.m. that evening:

Honestly, my first thought when looking at it was, "Aw, it looks like a real house." :)

Next up:

• Tonight, I'll paint the windows in the "treehouse" (that's the second story in the back, where we sometimes put out folding chairs and get a bird's-eye view of the backyard), which M sanded and primed yesterday.
• Then we'll move to the second story windows in the front, which we can access by crawling through the bedroom windows.
• After that, it's on to the second story windows on the side of the house (for which we need the biiiiig extension ladder), and finally the porch windows, which we're saving for last because they're so visible from the street and so much work.
• Oops, and then the garage windows, too. That'll do it for the trim.
• We'll finish up by repairing the front and back doors, and painting them red, along with the two doors to the garage.

Whew! Glad we got this started -- it's going to take a while.