Home Improvements

Just thought you might like to see what I have been doing with my last ever “free” vacation week.
The next time I have more than a holiday off, it will mean that Jenny is giving birth.
I put the time to some pretty good use.

We went camping in Westhampton, MA last Saturday, returning home Monday.
We visited with Jenny’s sister’s family and had lunch on Sunday with a couple of my friends that are now living in Northampton.
After we got home in the afternoon, I tried to get as many little items out of the way as possible.
You know, the oil the creaking hinges and clean the bird poop off the side of the house type stuff. 😉

Tuesday was kind of a bugger up here due to the rain and hail warnings.
It didn’t really do anything but look grey all day, so I started busting up concrete at part of our walk to the drive.
The previous owner had simply skim coated over some much older concrete and with all the salt we threw down last winter, the skim coat layer pretty much turned to dust! After removing all of the concrete and dropping in three bags of paver base dirt, I started laying in bricks.

I think another bag of paver base and 42 more bricks should do it!

The real reason I took this week off was to finally get the back of the house painted. I ran out of time last year and it really needed to be done. This is what it looked like Wednesday morning:

When I moved in, the entire house looked like this! Jenny and her brother, Jesse, started painting it some years ago, but, umm, yeah. This is what it looked like on Wednesday evening:

And then finally finished on Thursday afternoon/evening:

Some neighbors down the street were out on their porch watching me finish up. They congratulated and thanked me! If you look at the very top of the house, behind that tree, you will see a salmon-colored gable. I have this one, one of the other side and one on the front to go, but I am going to need help with the 40′ ladder, so I think these will just be “accents” for a while. 😉 Next year, I will tackle all of the white.

So far so good, right? But wait! There’s more! And this is the one I am most proud of.

The gate for our front walk was put together in a hurry…in a rain storm. It has, let’s say, not held up so well over the years. I think it makes the mailman grumpy, too.
It was 51″ wide, to start with. That is too wide for a gate. It was so wide that I actually had to stitch two photos together to make this a single image!

But, after some research and some thinking and staring, I figured it all out and it is 1000x better now.





It needs a couple of tweaks, but overall it is great! It opens all the way, which the last one did not do. It had sagged so much that it hit the concrete walk and would open just enough to allow a person to pass through without really lifting and forcing it open.

Add to those about a million other small things, like putting new rope on a cat scratching post and painting a floor drain cover. I probably spent too much money at Home Depot, but it was a way more productive and cheaper vacation than renting a beach cottage! I’d probably be finishing up the bricks today, but I just heard that I will be driving to Gales Ferry in a couple hours…