Зеркало

We’ve become avid porch hunters in the last few weeks, traversing the neighborhood on foot or on pedal in search of porches of a certain vintage from which we may draw inspiration. We’ve taken column designs from here, stair details from there, color organization from the other, and so forth. Today we saw a very [...]

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Paint Removal Finished!

We always thought the people we knew who complained of going crazy trying to wrangle contractors into place — trying to keep them remotely on task, on schedule, on planet — we always thought they must be exaggerating. Surely it can’t be that bad! Well, after 3-1/2 months trying to get the paint removers to [...]

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In the gutter

The guys from Co-op Gutters came today and cooperatively installed new gutters. The old ones were a disaster, which became especially obvious once the new ones went up. The old gutters (as they showed me) had been hacked (literally) to make them easier to install, with the result that any overflow flowed backwards toward the [...]

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Evergreen Dogwood

After a lovely morning spreading black plastic on the ground under the porch and weighting it down with giant rocks, I took a few delightful hours with a pickaxe and shovel to dig a 97-foot deep hole for our new Evergreen Dogwood tree. Strictly speaking, the hole was about 3 feet deep. But given that [...]

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Porch Reframing

Anna succumbed to some kind of Tom Sawyer thing, and found herself priming the undersides of all the new porch floorboards. The undersides, blue? Well, it’s the same protective porch & deck paint as will be on the top. It doesn’t care whether it’s blue or fuchsia. On Oct 9 the guys from Sampson Painting [...]

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Porch Removal

Paint gone, porch gone. Our builder Paul Naylor discovered that the old square columns were hollow! Nothing holding up the house but a few worm-eaten 1-bys. Nice we didn’t know that earlier; we would have lost sleep. Now he’s got it supported by half a dozen temporary 4x4s. More pics here.

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Paint Removal

Bring on the hazmat guys! Amazing and infernal work, heating this nasty lead paint just to the melting point and scraping it off “como mantequilla.” They wear full suits and respirators, thankfully, but man, they earn their keep. These 5 guys spent 12 hours doing the very complicated west side. A couple of days later [...]

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Home Improvements – prep

In preparation for our house’s 100th Birthday in 2010, we’re giving it a new porch, new paint, and other treats. The picture above, showing the completely unsuspecting house just a couple of days ago, doesn’t look so bad. A closer look, below, shows the paint is peeling badly. Plus, the porch is a little rotten. [...]

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