Curb Appeal

Late in the day on Labor Day, a car drove by my house, slowed, stopped, and the driver leaned out the window. "Thank you! It looks great," he said. Car after car, neighbor after neighbor driving by, walking by - their first words were "thank you."

Much of the work I have done on my house has been inside, so even though I have done a great deal of work that has improved the property, very little has been visible from the outside. And let's face it - my house is, well, in a word, ugly. It won't be - eventually - but now, with the faded brown aluminum siding, the triple track storms that half work, weeds where grass should be, weeds where garden beds should be, overgrown privet, and so on....

The impetus for the thank yous was the fact that we were mercilessly shearing the 140 feet of privet that was encroaching on the sidewalk, and had grown 8 or 10 feet tall. Now it is contained - not slapping pedestrians who try to walk down the sidewalk - and is about 4-1/2 to 5 feet tall. It is just tall enough to give my yard privacy, yet it isn't so tall that it feels like the green monster in Fenway Park.

Another addition to the landscaping was a flat place lined with bluestone and terrace blocks where I can put my trash cans. Since the sidewalk is higher than the curb, the landscaping of course slopes down, making the trash cans tilt and wobble and roll all over the place - particularly since we get a lot of high winds when the seasons change in fall and spring. So I had Phil and his crew dig out a section and put in some bluestone I had leftover from a previous landscaping project on a house I owned many years ago, and he brought in some block he had leftover from one of his jobs. What resulted was a lovely 6' by 5' flat area where I can put my trash cans.

There is so much I would love to do to the exterior of the house, but I can only spread myself and my wallet so thin... thus, I focus on the interior work, and try to get little one-day blasts of exterior work done that will make a huge impact but not take up valuable renovation time.

Our biggest goal for the rest of August was getting the upstairs completely painted and the baseboards reinstalled. This also meant I had to get my phone lines and jacks installed, and get the DirecTV installed as well. (Since neither of these companies offer a rough install for situations like this, I am having to pay for full service even though I am not even living in the house. Nice... So my dad has a little TV at the house, so he can listen to NCIS or Burn Notice marathons on USA while he's working!)

This also meant that we could finish wire all the electrical outlets that my dad had installed in the baseboards. All 27 of them - in three bedrooms... I believe in many outlets. We ended up running all the outlets in the baseboards because we discovered that on all the interior walls, the plaster stopped short of the floor, and on the exterior walls, we only had about three rows of lath to remove behind the baseboards to expose the bottoms of the studs.

This made it infinitely simpler to drill the studs, drop/fish wire from runs that went up to the attic, and run the circuits for the bedroom outlets. All my dad had to do was figure out where the outlets would go, cut extra holes in the baseboards (some of the existing electric was already in the baseboards) and run all new wire. Although it sounds fairly simple it was still a huge job, but it certainly could have been much worse if we hadn't thought to do it this way.

Our weekends have been filled with painting, while my dad's weeks were filled with finish phones, electrical, and whatever else needed to be sorted out. We used the Labor Day weekend to finish up the paint, put the urethane on the new shoemold that our floor guy will install once he's finished sanding and urethaning the floors, install the baseboards, touch up urethane and a zillion other details needed to be finished before Mark comes in to do the floors.

Right now I am writing from my favorite B&B in Ocean Grove, NJ. It's a little cool to be on the beach just now, but I will be venturing out just as soon as I post this. All of us are enjoying a week of R&R after a summer of break-neck renovation. I can't wait to post photos of the upstairs bedrooms with fresh paint, freshened woodwork, brand new electric, and gorgeous, restored pine floors. Very soon!!

The last items that we need to knock off our list to finish the upstairs rooms completely are installing the bathroom tile, and putting up all the electrical fixtures. I wanted to get the tile done before Mark came in to do the floors, but there simply wasn't enough time, and he is tough to get scheduled because he stays booked up. So I got a date from him and did the best I could to get as much done as possible. In a perfect world, the tile would have been complete. But I don't live in a perfect world - more like a 'best option' world! And so it goes...