House Work - November 21, 2018

In June (July?) we had our 10th anniversary of living in this house. I've dreamed of having my own house for FOREVER. I knew that when I finally had my own place, I was going to have the prettiest=looking house in the history of ever. It was going to be beautifully painted & decorated with artistic flair and have flowers and all that jazz.

Fast forward to when we bought our house. We were poor and just plain lucky to have a place. Life was also funny then. My husband and I were still newlyweds (4 years in) and I struggled with a lot of things. I wasn't happy, so I had no heart to decorate or garden or anything.

Fast forward to now. I'm happier (life is funny) and I feel the stirrings of wanting to have a pretty home. We were still poor, though, so getting anything done on the house didn't happen until we refinanced the loan. Yay! A little bit of money to do some things!

The wood siding on the front of our house has been slowly warping and flaking and coming apart from the whatever it was attached to. With some of the money left from refinancing, we decided to get the house stuccoed. I once lived in a house in Menlo Park, CA and it defined the pinnacle of "wow" for houses. Needless to say, it was stuccoed with the most beautiful texture. I wanted that in my home, too, because I wanted to live in a "wow" house. 

We hired a guy to do the job based on the recommendation of a person at church who does home inspections and that was good enough for us because we know NOTHING about how to do stuff like this.

Here's an early-morning picture of the last day with our house as it was. I was not going to miss the sandy color nor the old-fashioned wood siding or the peeling paint. Goodbye old house!

When the contractor ripped off the siding, he discovered we had NO INSULATION. For a nominal sum (meaning we could afford it without having a heart attack), he put insulation on the front of our house. We realized that if the front of the house had no insulation, the sides didn't either. It would explain why my bedroom (southeast corner) walls were warm to the touch all summer long. It was like living in an oven that was always on low.  The house was like this for Halloween - perfect except for the fact we had no porch light anymore. The kids couldn't see that our house was open for business! We had to resort to shouting at people walking across the street to let them know to come over. Usually it's the other way around, but not this year!

Next went up the chicken wire. It looked so fancy! I kinda liked the color, but knew it was going to be better.

When the contractor put on the concrete I couldn't believe how beautiful it was. He told us we needed to pick our color. It was hard not to ask to keep the concrete color. SO ELEGANT (and - not incidentally - the same color as the Menlo Park house).

We chose a white color. OH MY GOSH! I saw it for the first time when I came home from work this afternoon.  Quickest trip home EVER! The sun was setting already so the light is so-so, but the stucco is a beautiful color. It's not as smooth as the Menlo Park house, but the guy insists that it's "very modern" - he should have just said "It's what all the cool houses look like" - haha.

He's going to do the rest of the house now that we had a guy come and drill holes in the other sides of our house and spray in insulation. That was a little less expensive than I feared. The same with getting the rest of the stucco done, too. Now that the outside of our house is done, I just might be ready to garden. 

And then we need to get that front walk fixed!

After!