If you follow me on Instagram, I asked the Internet what we should do with the exterior of our house. You see... our house is very white. It has old white siding on the upper portion and white shoddy parging on the bottom. In all honesty it never really bothered me but it has bothered Mark for a long time and this year he decided it was time to do something about it.
His way of doing something goes as follows: Research the bazookas out of a project for months (or years in this case) and then suddenly pull the trigger. He pulled the trigger this time by taking apart the front stairs and pulling out all of the plants and then pulling off the parging in the back to expose pretty lath and plaster.
Ok so I guess we're doing this then?
Soon the house looked like this and I felt like I was living in a weird '80s horror movie.
Cut to today and we have made a bit of progress.
Here's what we've done:
- The roof had to be done so that was done first. Apparently we had three inches of water sitting on the roof over Mila's room. The roof was brown and is now black (no pic).
- We decided to stucco the sides of the house where some old parging was falling apart. The stucco really cleaned everything up.
- We discovered that the front of the house was hanging on by a thread under the white parging. When our handyman started working on it, it was moving around so basically he had to take all the parging off, along with the first layer of brick and re-brick the front and sides of the porch on the right. We're going to be putting stone on the base so it doesn't matter what the brick looks like as long as it's sturdy (hence the two colours of brick).
- We also decided to stucco the caps of the porch to clean them up and create a continuous line. You'll notice in the before picture at the top, there's a break in the cap right under the brick arches and we wanted to fill it in.
- We added a stucco ledge to the side and back of the house. The stone will go under and new siding will go above. It doesn't look level but believe me it is! (Arg old houses!).
Here's what's left to do:
- Install stone the front and back bottom walls.
- Install siding and shakes to the front on the top (the shakes will go in the peak) and install siding on the back of the house. This will include the window frames. We're going with a light grey/brown siding.
- Install two new windows on the far northeast side of the house.
- Rebuild the stairs which will include new stone ledges and caps.
- Later on we'll likely add big stones to the front garden and put some of our plants back!
So that's what's been going on around here.
Oh and guess what I decided to do before all this work started... host an outdoor wedding shower for my sister! I think I'll be embracing a rustic look ;).
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