Exterior

I had a little time over the weekend to start working on the shingles for the back wall. It’s the type of project that I visualize as being very quick and easy, but of course, it’s not. On every row I was reminded of every non-plumb surface on our house and had to deal with the almost-but-not-quite-right angles of cedar shingles. It should look great once it’s all painted, although it’s taking me a bit of time to get used having siding back there, having shingles instead of lap and having the corner trim, which is a new detail we had to add to be able to cleanly mate up the disparate siding materials.

Normally I like shingle courses spaced a little tighter, but having them larger is not only saving us a ton of $$, but it also sort of mirrors the unusually large exposure of our lap siding on the rest of the house. Lastly, the 11″ spacing was the only way I could work out to keep each electrical box within a single course. I didn’t want to have to put in the big pieces of wood that often surround lights and switches on newer houses. In the same spirit as removing all the conduit and sinking everything into the wall, I’m trying to make it all look less cluttered.

Looking like a real house now...

Although this weekend was a bit too rainy to get deep into the railing and post replacement, I did take time this afternoon to fabricate the new railings. The existing porch and step railings appear to have been homemade from 2x4s, so I ripped and sanded these to match. I also improved the design a bit by creating a channel to recess the top of the balusters, as well as adding a drip groove.

Apparently, I don't own a dado blade set. Also, I'm sure I'd be too lazy to ever swap it in and out anyway, so I just improvise...

I hadn’t yet managed to take my obligatory week “off” to work on the house, so I scheduled it for last week. On the Wednesday prior, I got a call from our mortgage broker saying that the underwriter at the bank was freaking out about our exposed plywood siding on the kitchen. They wouldn’t close the loan (scheduled for 6 days later) with it in that condition. I told him “no way,” that we were going to have to walk away from the deal, since finishing that was going to be a big, complicated mess that we weren’t prepared to do at this time. While it was ugly, the deep overhangs of our house did a really good job of protecting it from the weather, so I thought it was a ridiculous requirement. Anyway, after Stephanie and I talked it over that night, we decided that it made sense to go ahead and try to finish the siding, since we would be losing nearly $500 in our wasted appraisal, not to mention the $350 in extra interest that were were paying each month.

Now for some of the back story to help explain why we weren’t too excited about taking on this project and kept deferring it. First, here’s a picture (taken for my dad, so he could create our landscape plan), which shows the area in question. Yeah, exposed plywood isn’t the best idea, but it really doesn’t look bad considering that it’s been that way for 7 years!

One of these things is not like the others

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When we moved into our house, the front railings looked this:

A little mildew, but not too bad...

After about one year, we found that they had rotted out. Like so many things done by our previous owner, I’m sure it was fixed up with a nice coat of paint just before we bought the house. For a long time we got by with one railing, but it’s long since given up its ghost as well. I was supposed to be replacing all of this last week when I was taking time off of work, but a certain other thing got in the way. The goal is still to get these in place and painted before the winter rains start.

One railing and pot removed, so the one remaining is the "good" one

There is seriously no wood left in that thing!!

It actually is more of a present for ourselves, but shhh….don’t tell the house. It turns 100 this year, and it’s a little sensitive about the whole thing. Sure, everyone says that the 100′s are the new 80′s, but it’s still feeling a bit old.

We bid on an artistic rendering of a home at Ginger’s preschool auction fundraiser a couple of weeks ago. I’ve always thought that these were cool, but it’s not something that we ever got around to doing (how can we spend money on a picture of our house when the actual thing still wants to suck every cent it can out of our bank account?). Well the auction gave us a great excuse to have it done, and we’re pretty excited to have the sketch. The artist, Ken, did a great job, and he was really pleasant to work with. We wanted to give him a mention on our site in case anyone is interested in having something like this done for their own home. As you can see, he does nice work.

Sketch by Ken Quinlan-Pierce

Big holes in the roof happened.  No, not those kind…the good ones.  After weathering multiple seasons with a leaky patio roof, we finally bit the bullet and had it replaced.   Additional benefits of having it done included making it strong enough to walk on for cleaning and having those big holes (aka skylights) added.  While the huge cover has been great to have in the rainy season (although the leaks kind of defeated the point), it’s massive footprint (22×28′) created a LOT of shade.  And while the structure of the roof was really well done, the sheeting, chintzy, poorly-supported aluminum panels, meant that it was incredibly difficult to walk on top of the roof.  We now have a solid 3/4″ surface that will make it really easy to sweep off once or twice a year.  Or every four years, whichever the case may be.

I had intended to purchase a couple of moderately sized skylights, say 2′x4′, but the roofer we used had a much better suggestion.  He came up with the idea of framing out 4×12′ boxes, which then could be covered with a single sheet of polycarbonate.  By running the panels under the eaves and all the way back to the house, no flashing would be necessary at the top, and by extension, no leaks should ever develop.  Another perk of doing it this way was that for the same $$ as what we would have paid for 16 square feet of skylights, we ended up with at least 80 square feet!  The patio is now WAY brighter, and we are also getting much more light into our kitchen and family room.  A win-win.

Pile of old aluminum panels

Since the roofers left things half-done during the rainiest day on record, I had to create an aqueduct to channel all the runoff

LIGHT!

View from above

This is what it looked like a few years ago, when I had to cut the hole for the upstairs drywall. The roof would then spend the next 3 years being covered with a (barely effective) blue tarp.

They came back out yesterday to swap out the mis-drilled panels and to install the other door, as well as our hardware. Not only do they look so much better, they actually work. No more fighting with doors that won’t open or close! Now we just need paint and the rest of the trim…

A big difference!

Here is how our garage looks today.  All the trim is up except the header boards, and one of our garage doors is in.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that the garage door company fubar’d the hardware, though, which means we have to wait longer so they can get replacement panels.

Because these are faux-carriage doors, we wanted hardware that at least helped maintain the illusion.  Stephanie had discussed this with the door company, and the decision was that we would procure the hardware on our own (since they didn’t seem to be able to or want to get it).  When she came out of the house during the install, though, she found a single, standard chrome handle had been installed near the middle of the door.  It is weird how such a small thing can make such a difference, but it really does.  The handle is neither centered on the door, nor centered on the piece of door to which it’s attached.  It grabs your eye and really makes you look at it.  Additionally, the lift handle at the bottom (not visible in photo) was installed in a similar off-kilter way.  We are now waiting for new panels to be made, and these will end up going to someone that doesn’t want their “carriage doors” to look like carriage doors.  Otherwise, though, the door looks really good and will look even better once it’s painted to match the house colors.

If you compare the two pictures, you will notice the middle looks very different.  Previously, the two doors were centered in their respective openings, but the right garage is about 11″ wider than the left.  This made for a funky imbalance in the trim.  Stephanie had the great idea of shifting the right door over towards the right side, so that all trim could be the same size.  Fortunately, the CMU blocks in the middle section were recessed by almost 3/4″ relative to the concrete header, so it was a (relatively) simple matter of building this area up with plywood, which will get painted to match the garage/house color.  The new symmetry gives the whole garage a much more polished look.

Before the gap between doors was widened

While the timing could have been better, our missing boards were sitting in front of the garage when I got home from work!  It would have been a little sweeter if they had shown up before yesterday, when I re-fabbed all of them, but the good-at-heart person that mistakenly thought they were being given away returned them to their rightful place.  Yay, people!

Missing boards....returned!

Last Sunday, while trying to finish up the trim on the sides of the garage doors, we fell victim to an overeager freecycler.  As anyone who lives on the eastside of Portland knows, it’s super easy to get rid of stuff you don’t want any longer.  Piles of things, some useful and some not, are routinely left out in the parking strips.  This form of reuse is very common, and while I generally think it’s a good thing, it is also important to actually only take the things that people mean to give away.

The three 1×10 cedar boards that I had painstakingly cut, notched and primed to sit proudly on the sides of our new garage doors did not fall into that category.  Yes, they were sitting too close to the curb while I ran to the hardware store for some nails, but there was no “free” sign on them.  It is awfully presumptuous to think you can grab anything within reach of your car without even making the effort to knock on the door first.  Or maybe they were taken maliciously, but regardless, they were gone.

Some signs on the trees and postings on craigslist didn’t result in the miraculous return of our boards, so I had to take yesterday off work to get new ones all ready for the garage door install on Thursday.  Since the 1x10s were kind of scarce (Mr. Plywood had only a few of them, and most were pretty knotty), I switched to 1x8s and used a scarf joint to increase the width by 2″.  This should get covered by whatever trim strip comes with the garage door anyway.

The biggest part of the day was breaking up the concrete under the door.  A tree root growing under the driveway had gradually pushed up the center of the door by at least two or three inches.  Since it was a small area, I thought I could just get it done with a breaker bit on my rotohammer (something I have never attempted in the past, mind you).  20 minutes of zero progress was enough to convince me to drop the $35 on a jackhammer rental.  It still took over an hour to bust it all up, but it would’ve taken three days with the rotohammer!  Eventually, I will break up the rest of the “driveway” (maybe 5′ in length) up to the sidewalk and then replace it, likely with pavers.

Sitting flat for the first time in years