86'n It

We didn't get anything done on our house this weekend because it was our one year wedding anniversary!
Marc surprised me with horseback riding at the Biltmore estate, then a picnic by the bass pond, then some frolicking in the sunflower fields!


It was really awesome. My butt hurts from the horseback riding, but Marc was such a trooper. He'd only been riding once before, but he and Poncho did great!


It looked like it was going to storm, so we went home and had a picnic in the living room. I think 3 bottles of wine might have been too much as evident in this photo:

So, an old boyfriend of the previous crazy owner stopped by today. Marc talked to him for a while and he gave us some good dirt!

First of all, he is a sort of rich guy who was really well dressed and had just come from the fly fishing supply store that is right around here. I seriously can not understand why he would have been dating the old owner!

Anyway, he ended up telling us what we already suspected. She was very close to foreclosure, actually much closer than we thought though. Apparently, it was so bad that the bank was going to lock her out and take the house, but we put a bid in on it, so they let her stay. Holy crap!

He also told a bunch of personal stuff related to the fact that he bought the new furnace and paid for the new roof! He also said that she had a hard time heating the house even with the new furnace, but he thinks it was because of all the CRAP that she had in front of the radiators. I have to agree, because we had no problems heating it and it was cold when we first bought it. Anyway, she couldn't keep the kitchen heated, and her pipes were always bursting... nice.

And he knew about the fires in the chimney that she never had cleaned. He said the only way she knew about it was because the wall was turning brown (the one has the chimney in it in the upstairs bedroom)OMG.

She is so lucky that we bought this damn house. Sad thing is, he told us know much she paid for it in 1999. It made me sick to my stomach. I'm erasing it from my memory right now.

(That's "Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Accredited Professional")

WOOO HOOO! I've been studying my butt of for the past 2 weeks for this exam, and I was really freaked out about it, but I passed! With at 183 (91.5%)! Heck yeah!

Now I know all about how "not" environmentally friendly our renovation is! (Just joking, we aren't that bad.)

Check out how many trees I had to kill to learn how to be environmentally responsible:

Seriously, I am not going to post any more about back porch until the screens are in and it is done, because we did like 6 hours of work on this weekend and these pictures look exactly like the ones that I took a month ago.
To point out what took 6 hours: Marc finished the columns. He put the finish boards around the corner 4x4 post and put the final one against the wall. Then we put in all the blocking for the trim around the bottom and filled the crack between the concrete and the wood will with gravel ("recycled" from our driveway). Nice.

Here is the cool wisteria wine that is on our house. It didn't flower too long this year because we got an early frost and I didn't know to cover it. But I am looking forward to coming years because it looks amazing and smells great. Here's a pic of it crawling up the house. This is mid-removal.




The real issue was the it had crawled up the house by twisting around out cable line. I had to unhook the cable line then manually untwist it from the vines. Man, that wisteria is so grabby! I wasn't afraid of falling of the roof because I am pretty sure that it would have wrapped right around me a saved me.


Anyway, I spend a good amount of time Saturday untangling and relocating it from the side of the house to a little "fence" that we built. It looks sort of weird, but at least we can check off something on the LONG pre-painting prep list. After the house is painted, we will be putting one vine on the side of the back porch and the other along a nicer fence running into the back yard.


I also removed all the unused cables and telephone lines from all over the side of the house. Marc was hard at work finishing the final 2 porch columns. Then I helped lay the final piece of sub-floor and put in the trim blocking... We are finally almost at a stopping point with the porch prior to painting. It looks great, too bad the stinking camera wouldn't work! Urgh... I'll post pics when I can.

So I finally figured out how to add labels to the posts, so now if you click on one of the links below the floorplan on the right, it will show you all the posts about one area or activity! Pretty cool.

So I should be studying, but instead I'm messing with paint colors. We took the colors outside and held them in the sun with the brick. Looks pretty snazzy if you ask me. A little more green then gold, but I'm thinking that might be a good thing.
So here are the colors, put on our house very 'rudementarily'. (I'm pretty sure that's not a word, but oh well, you get what I mean.)

This was all started when Marc said:

"I think gold is coming back in a BIG way"

We had some more boring schemes that were blue-green, but this is most historically accurate, and more importantly, very very FUNKY!

I really want something that is going to really pop and be different.

So normally I don't like to talk about how much stuff costs, not because I'm secretive, but because I'm cheap and I hate to admit it that I've spent $... but this I've got vent about.

Marc has been working hard meeting with painters and getting quotes. We knew there were going to be all over the place, but really? How can it be so different???? Check these out:

$5,000
$10,000
$17,500

Um, what? Granted the last one included reglazing (or at least reputtying) all the windows, but the second one didn't! We've got to get on the ball and secure the first guy. Marc really liked him and he did the neighbor's house and it looks great.

We've got a list a mile long of stuff to do before the painting can even start. #1 is get some $$.

Why did I pick the hottest weekend of the year to to lawn work? Who knows. The plants that Adam and I potted are all doing very well. I water them about every other day with all the water from the basement dehumidifier.


So the house across the street was recently painted, which was just making ours look so much more shotty, so I decided it was time to mow, take all the trash off the front porch and do some weeding. Here's a before and after shot of the wall in front of our house.

Things are slow here on the home front. We rearranged my desk at work, so I brought some of my office decoration home for the fireplace.

These three little guys are called Dunnies. They are little bunnies that are all the same shape, but decorated differently by famous graphic designers/graffiti artists/etc. Pretty cute.

Eureka! No more stupid brick fireplace PAINTED the same red color as the red brick. I would really love to know the logic of the person who did that. It is like painting an orange ORANGE!

Anywho. At least it is done and I love it. It lightens up the room and more importantly makes it look clean. I have never had such an affinity for cleanliness as I do now after living in this house. I want it sparkling.

We had to create a "Boy in the Bubble" setup in the living room to do this operation. It was pretty funny and Marc kept threatening to keep me in there and feed me thru a trap door. Real Funny.


So this is all looking very white-on-white. The inside of the fireplace and the concrete slab in front of it will end up being black, which will help, but we also paint the ceiling a subtle color. Just Like we are doing/did in the dining and parlor. Well, I don't think you can call the parlor ceiling orange subtle, but oh well. You get what I mean.

Next up: more porch. Yep. Bet you are as excited as I am. Blech.

So we took the plunge and rented a paint sprayer this weekend with the intention of spraying the fireplace and back porch ceiling. The porch ceiling because part of it is OSB board (really rough plywood) and is really hard to paint with a brush or roller.

Before we did that, we wanted to lay the final sub-floor down. We are using treated plywood. The ants hate it and nothing gives me more pleasure than watching ants climb onto it and try to bite into it only to be totally disgusted. Ha! Foiled you, annoying ants!

Anyway, we rented the paint sprayer from Home Depot and went to town. The thing had mad overspray, so we ended up looking like ghosts, but I think it was worth it.

It really lightens up the porch back there and will keep it from becoming too dark of corner in when we actually do landscaping and stuff around the porch.