Four Projects!

Contents

1. Out Front.

2. Living Room

3. Exterior Trim

4. Road Repair

Prolog

New York Thruway, eastbound near Utica 9/2/19

Mist 11/26/20

1. Out Front

The final plan in place, is to install a new walkway and front stoop. The work is scheduled for late June 2021.

The front walkway is going to being moved further from the house. See below, the old walkway in red, and the new walkway, where it says "future pavers".

Early spring, 2021, final walkway plan.

I'm having a contractor do the work, probably beginning end of June. Installing paving stones is precision work. You have to dig down, then lay special sand that has to be compacted, like a graham cracker crust, and smoothed to be perfectly level. Paving blocks are then laid on top of the sand.

The pavers will have dark gray borders, and granite colored curbing around the planting bed. The front stairs and railings will also be replaced.

The planting bed where the bushes are, will be surrounded by sort of like curbing, except more natural. The dream is to then mulch the planting bed and install lighting!

Below is from the catalog, showing the style. Pavers will be Granite City and border will be Charcoal. I'm not including the white color in between.

Tree Planting and Art Deco

Ballek's Nursery planted a Norway Spruce in my front yard, early May. The new tree is in the foreground, in photo below. The guy who planted it was super helpful and told me that the evergreens in my yard were Norway Spruce (back yard), Colorado Blue Spruce (behind left of house) and Hemlock (behind the garage).

Below you might notice that the upstairs trim is white, but the downstairs yellowish. I'm partway through painting the exterior trim, an offwhite called Montgomery White. I haven't yet painted the second floor trim.

not as yellow as it looks here

The front door sconce lights are now the style you see below.

"Light Oil Rubbed Bronze LED Outdoor Wall Mount Lantern with White Glass"

The house was built in the 1930s and has some Art Deco in its soul. I tried to bring that out a little with the front lighting. The new lights are seen below on either side of the front door.

5/30/21

Famous examples of Art Deco include the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, the Golden Gate Bridge, and parts of Miami Beach.

2. Living Room

Finding a living room color living room took iterations over a couple years. Photo below is from before I bought the house.

Open House, 2018

Staircase at Open House:

I started out with dark red, the best I could come up with for the Victorian furnishings....

Looks like a good place to solve a mystery, such as what colors would work better!

Because the darkness in the living room wasn't working. It seemed forced. The house wants to be more contemporary.

Below, I'm painting primer on the trim and woodwork fireplace mantel, and trying yellow on the walls.

There was much experimentation with color. For the next rendition of living room color, I went with Old World Romance for the living room, and Morning Sunshine for the stairwell. This photo shows color samples from the hardware store.

I taped the color charts to the wall and kept them there for several days, before settling on a color. The big challengs is that the color samples are very small, and you don't know the final effect until almost the entire room has been re-painted. A slight off-white in the sample, can end up seeming like glaring yellow once the whole room is painted that color!

Sample-size and quart-sized paint cans.

Below, shows the aftermath of some of the painting chaos. Finally things are settling down. Except that the Victorian furniture doesn't go with the new look.

Walls: Old World Romance. Trim: White Dove.

Below, the color is Morning Sunshine along the stairs.

Couch

The couch is a 4-piece sectional from Overstock.com, came in four boxes.

The coffee table I got used from the "Letgo" app, which is sort of like Craigslist except it is meant more for smartphones. Letgo has since changed its name to OfferUp.

I re-painted the tall cabinet white. The TV stand is also from Overstock.com.

Living Room - Final Color

The "Old World Charm" color was too yellow. Too warm a color. I repainted it in "Candlelight" from the True Value EasyCare Neutrals collection.

The wall color shown below is what it looks like today.

Intermission - Lawn Mower

At least once a year, the lawn mower gets taken apart. Grass gets caked up almost everywhere in the machinery.

The "cutting deck" hangs beneath the tractor, and is where the blades turn. Below, I detached the cutting deck to clean it, and replace the blades. Three new blades go for $50. You can have them sharpened for less, but mine needed replacing.

Cutting deck upside-down to install new blades

New blade (black) next to the old one.

3. Exterior Trim

The garage trim (Montgomery White) worked out well. Now in progress, is painting of the main house trim, using Montgomery White.

Below, the rear patio French doors were brown-stained. They look solid black in this photo:

After Montgomery White....

Below you see the garden, ready to plant wildflowers. I also pulled out the the old fence posts surrounding the garden.

4/14/21

4. Street Repair

The street washed out 5.26.18. The repair began 2 1/2 years later, and took about six months.

I could walk to the site and take pictures. Pictures below show different stages of the construction.

First, they scraped the stream down to the bedrock. Below is a view from the street, looking down upon the bedrock. The exposed bedrock and stream winds its way upward in the picture, starting lower right. The giant black tarp prevents rain from weakening the slope along the gulley.

11/24/20

Below, you can see the stream coming from upstream. Building to left is the Legion hall.

11/14/20

Behind the house

Below is Neptune Brook where it goes behind the house. The stream turns left further down, where it meets the road.

11/26/20

Lucky Toes

The garden posts are still there, in this photo from November. They are now gone.

12/16/20

The stream is going to flow beneath the street through a new concrete tunnel. In photo below, the workers are starting to build the tunnel.

In photo below, the giant black tarp as seen from the other side of the brook.

1/10/21

By March, the tunnel was finished, and covered over with an earth embankment. The large stones are jagged on purpose, so they lock in place and hold the slope!

3/19/21

In photo above, the lower cement thing is the tunnel outlet. The tunnel opening is hidden behind one of the side walls. In photo below, the gravel road bed is in place.

I was there the day they did the paving. I asked the pavers if they did a load test yet, since the workers were on break. A load test is when extra-heavy equipment is carried across to make sure the road is strong enough. One worker said the did the load test, and you can't lay the pavement until after the road bed passes the test. He said for the load tests, they have a special procedure using heavy equipment, and also used "this guy" for the test, pointing to a heavier guy on the work crew. The heavier guy rolled his eyes, as the joke was light hearted.

New pavement! But road still closed - no guardrails

4/14/21

Work finished, road open The final piece of the repair was the guard rails.

5/18/21

Heavy rain came 2021 Memorial Day weekend. In photo below, a mini waterfall approaches the new tunnel. Water is flowing toward the bottom of this picture, to the tunnel entrance.

Photo from the new bridge, 5/30/21

Future Projects

The bathroom sink is tiny and needs replacing. Here are some I saw at IKEA. I will probably have a plumber do the work.

Past Projects

Stairwell, now painted Meuslin

Dining room painted Gray Mountain for an urban contemporary feel.

Nice table from Treasures. Treasures is an antique/used furniture store in Old Lyme where the well-off unload their furniture. The table is a Pottery Barn.

The front porch is now painted a color called "Beach Light", including contemporary wall sconces on the left to match. The next challenge is to find curtains or shades with a contemporary or art-deco feel.

Goodbye,

Old Gangly Branch

The gangly branch of the Honey Locust had taken over the backyard view like an incision. It was time for it to go! The old branch is the one shaped like an S.