With Love and Discouragement...

New puppy, traveling, local site-seeing, and cross-coastal friends visiting... we have had an EXCEPTIONAL whirlwind of fun the past few weeks!

The downside: it's now more painfully obvious than ever how much the exterior of our house looks like something out of Life After People.

SO, to hopefully get our asses in gear, here are some "Accountability Befores"... and hopefully we can at least get our house to a level of ignorability before the crowds set in...

As we know... the front garden:

Needs: Rototilling (sp?!), topsoil, plants, mulch, and possibly rocks to finish it off...

The front porch:

(WHICH I managed to punch a hole in last week! Nothing makes a thick girl feel worse than a chair leg dropping through a floorboard... rotted or not...)

Needs: New moulding, prime, paint, sconce, outdoor tablecloth, replace floorboard.

The driveway and front walkway:

Needs: Edging, weed pulling/killing. (NEED a new driveway... but lets keep this list manageable...)

The back porch:

Needs: Oh so very much... new door, new sconce, a good scrub down!

The back (This is extra embarrassing, but I am putting it all out there!!):

Needs: A good cleanup/purge of junk (yes, there are three grills, and NO, none of them work! I know, absolutely ridiculous!), some weed wacking, and a clawfoot tub with veggies planted in it! :)

Oh yeah, and I still want to get that rain barrel!!

We May Be a Little Distracted...

This weekend, there may be a little less of the "Getting Sh!t Done" attitude we usually have around the Money Pit... 

We picked up our own little mongrel last night, (see the one with the white diamond on the back of his head?) although I did want to take all of them!

I think there are still a couple available, if you live in or around the Buffalo area. Let me know if you want one of these loves, it would be so cool for a friend to have one of his brothers or sisters!

So... we might be a little busy... updates to follow :)

Lie Like a Rug

You know, that saying makes it sound so easy. Like rugs just lie around, all on their own. Well the truth is, you gotta force them to lie flat and even. Especially when you've got a funny bay window like this to trim around:

So to make our terrace usable, we got our outdoor carpet, unrolled it, and got to cutting. At this point:

the undertaking seemed impossible. Something we didn't think about; how do you pull and flatten a carpet on a second floor, where the only place to stand is ON the carpet? But, we managed to get it pretty much where we needed it...

...and got to it. It was a slow-but-sure process; pull, cut, and readjust... pull, cut, and readjust... 

And the more excess that got cut off, the flatter it got...

Until finally the last bit of cutting was the far edge from where we started... a feat Nick took on... at about high noon, in 90° weather... and at this point we were pretty punchy...

"Rug, I'mma cut chu!"

So finally, it was all flat and trimmed... next stop, stapling it down! Why not glue, you ask? I was worried that the rug may not last (probably won't last) as long as our brand new terrace would, and I didn't want to risk pulling up a worn glued-down carpet in 3 or 4 years, just to also pull up the actual roof with it. So, we figured with the heat, the tar would seal around the staples, and would also keep the rug down nicely. Problem: no staples for the staple-gun. 

So the stapling got pushed to the next day... (since we couldn't get to the hardware store until about 8pm) But luckily my brother came over for a visit, found my camera, and took some pictures of himself...

If you've been to my house, I know what you're wondering, and yes, he's sitting on the toilet while taking these pictures. (Let ye who mess with my camera be warned - the pictures WILL find their way to the blog! MUAHAHAHA!)

SO next day - stapler in hand - we nail the sucker down and set up the awesome patio set I got from my sister, Kelly! And finally I have what I've wanted since my days of living in a basement apartment in Queens... 

From this:

to this:

Be still my heart.

They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To...

So anyone who has had a porch beer at our house knows that our front porch ceiling looks like this...

Because the second floor porch was rotted, when it rained the water came down through the paneled ceiling, hence rotting the panels (and the porch floor beneath, but that's another story for another day...) And we haven't been able to fix it until the second floor porch was fixed, stopping the leaking. Now that it is - this weekend's project was fixing the panels!

Simple right? Go to the store, buy some panels, throw 'em up, easy peasy!

Siiiigh, when will I learn? WRONG! Well, let's start from the beginning... First Nick tore down all the unusable rotted panels still up.

Next, we had to deal with the fact the new panels were WAY thinner than the old ones (which we knew before we walked out of the store).

So we took some old lath [still] laying around, and we used them as shims! (Am I using that word correctly?)

(We so heart the nailgun!!)

TaaDaaaaaa!!

We hold up one of the boards - it's JUST the right depth! PERFECT! ALRIGHT! We are on the right track, things are working out, let's keep this momentum going... Three hours later we have....

Wah waaaaaah.... oh wait... that one's the wrong size... take it down... Ok, we have one line of boards done by 8:00pm Saturday night... awesome. So much for a one day project... that's okay, we'll start again bright and early tomorrow...

Sunday morning: more measuring, more cutting, more sanding, some more measuring... (measure twice, cut once, kids...) Finally the aluminum trim around the inside of the porch was just TOO in the way, so I declared "TEAR IT DOWN! I'LL BUILD A NEW ONE OUT OF WOOD!" (This may be what's giving me my mostly-undeserved confidence about being able to build anything I want...) And what did we find...

TREASURE!! Okay, not treasure in the normal sense, but treasure to anyone who owns a 100 year old house with tons of crappy 60's veneers on it! Original wood moulding and beams... in pretty good shape too, thanks to the siding... some sanding and a coat of paint, and this sucka's good as new...

Nick's excited... (Okay, maybe that's his "fake excitement for you, crazy lady" face...)

And so by noon when I have to leave we have:

Still pretty lame for another 3 hours of work... but that's okay, I know as I go off I'm leaving the project in good hands... and when I come home we haaaaaave:

HUZZAH!!! Completion! Okay, maybe this should be another WAH WAAAAH for a whole weekend's worth of work, but this makes me a happy girl, and once it's painted, it's gonna be awesome, so cheers to porch beers under a pigeon-free, leak-free roof!!!

Black Thumb

Hi, my name is Alyson, and I'm a plant murderer... [Hiiiiii Alyson...] Yeah, it's true, I just don't "get" gardening; it's dirty, and full of bugs, and worms, and slugs, and I kill anything with roots and leaves, except weeds, apparently I can grow them, and it's just really HARD [panting, out of breath, exasperated]. Now, my sister is another story, she can grow anything, she enjoys being in the dirt... and thereby is a mcjudgerson when it comes to my house's "curb appeal." So, with a big "Pre-Reno/Sibling Grad Party" looming, I went out and bought me-self some flowers! And pots! And soil! And gosh-darnit, I planted me some flowers...

In my triumph, I call Megan... who promptly deflates my proud posture.. "There are holes in the bottom, right?"

.......?

"WELL IF THE POTS NEED HOLES IN THE BOTTOM FOR DRAINAGE WHY WOULD THEY SELL POTS THAT DON'T HAVE HOLES IN THEM!?"

Enter my hero, my rescuer, my power-tool-weilding superman, who I pouty-faced asked to drill holes in the pots. And he did, even the super heavy, already full of dirt one...

And.. I haven't killed them JUST yet... (these pictures are from today):

And then my adorable, sweet grandparents bring me this:

So now I REALLY gotta get used to this whole gardening thing... Because my garden looks like this:

Sooooo I guess I will be doing that soon. Very soon... because I don't want to kill it, but I did give them fair warning it MAY be dead in a week...

Fingers crossed... black thumbs and all...

New Roof... Check!

Well, the roof is DONE! It was done Friday, and we left right away for our relaaaaxing weekend.

Here are just a few before and after shots... obviously they did way more than we're showing here...

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Second floor patio, before:

After:

Before:

After:

And in case you can't tell from the photos, we've also got some shiny new gutters that I think are going to make things très easier when it rains. Like... not raining IN MY BATHROOM. The past few days have been a fantastic test – AND – no leaks! Awesome.

But, speaking of the gutters... this is a concern...

I don't like how it kind of just goes... no where. SO, our neighbors agree, what better place for a rain barrel?? I've been wanting one, and so have they, and what a perfect place between our houses to share one!

Our exterior is needing some SERIOUS TLC, but May is always so crazy, I'm worried it will be a few weekends until we can get to it... but it's coming!