ALLLmost There!

The three-day Fourth of July weekend made time for some high-impact finish work on the house. Going into the weekend, I had the following list of thing I wanted to accomplish:

1. finish the trim paint on the eaves and gutters - DONE
2. barkdust the flowerbeds in the back yard - DONE
3. install the latch on the dining room stained glass window - DONE
4. Clean out the garage. - MOSTLY DONE
5. remove the five junipers in the front yard - IN PROCESS
6. Fix the awkward crooked gutter thing at the front door - IN PROCESS
7. put some trim pieces on the corners of the house where we replaced the siding
8. plant grass on the unseeded half of the front yard
   

I also did a couple other items not even on the list:

1. figured out how to make the pantry roll smoothly. Floor just needs a piece of masonite!
2. installed the ogee baseboard trim in C's office
3. installed C's fancy door knocker on the restored front door
4. fixed the crooked door trim around the front door
5. installed the original (freshly restored) house number tiles
6. fixed the open gap in the garage wall near the small garage door
7. Installed the new doorbell button at the back door
8. Cleaned house paint over-spray off some of the vinyl windows in the back

I'll update the slide show with some new AFTER shots.

The dining room window latch is a turn-latch with a strike plate. The strike plate gets installed IN the window casing, with some chisel work to make a void for the latch. Then, the latch goes on the window frame. Close the window, turn the latch into the strike plate, and it cinches closed. Easy enough...except for making it all fit well in the three-dimensional space. You only get one shot at this, afterall. Nonetheless, after three hours of careful drilling, chiseling and carving, I had succeeded in matching the latch to the strike plate.I ended up having to carve away about a quarter inch of the window frame underneath the latch piece, so as to countersink the latch. It turned out well, given that the top of the latch mounting plate now lies flush with the window frame itself...looks 'right' and intentional. That's the point, I guess. I was quite afraid that the window would fit poorly when I finished. Luckily, those fears were unfounded.

We pulled the original WPA-style house number tiles out, renewed the black paint on the numbers, sealed the paint with clearcoat, and put the tiles back into a brand-new reproduction frame from Rejuvenation. The result? Historic, original numbers that look 75 years younger.

Some of the back-side window frames got a dose of over-spray when the house was painted. I figured out that a bit of Painter's Pal solution, followed by a light scrub with steel wool is a relatively quick way to remove the paint. It takes a bit of effort, but not nearly as much as scraping with a razor blade or other such method. Good news, that. There are only three windows (and one screen door) needing this sort of aattention.

And then there was the garage. Ah, the garage! Saturday was garage day. We looked like a garage sale as we put all the stuff out into the alley and the parking strip. With some room to work, we cleaned up the dust and scrap that the contractors stuffed everywhere. Then we got the shelves arranged properly and pulled the 'sell/donate' items off the shelves and into the 'sell/donate' stack. Some logical ordering of shelving contents, and sorting/combining of the remaining boxes left us at the end of the day with:

• a car-load of donate/sell items all staged to go. There will be more in this category, once we've gone through the remaining boxes.
• about a dozen boxes for the living room, dining room, kitchen areas
• about 16 boxes of kid stuff including obsolete toys, science kits, etc.
• a clean garage floor
• bump-outs fully functional as storage alcoves for yard and automotive items
• organized and logical storage system for our other stuff
• a garbage can already full of stuff for disposal
• a big pile of scrap firewood for the Chiminea.

I'm realizing that, with the exception of: the porch stained glass (yet to install, 4 hours); the pantry floor (proven out, 1 hour); M's baseboard trim around her curved section (4 hours); and back door hinge replacement (overnight), my in-the-house list to-do is essentially complete.

Everything else is outdoors. And that's getting short too! Trim paint second coat (2 hours), siding trim corners (3 hours), juniper removal (a day) and grass seed (2 hours), front yard bark dust (4 hours).

I count about 30 man-hours of work here, and I'm done.