Shingle bells.

That's not as clever a title as I hoped it'd be. Anyhow, we left off with the front bay of the house needing to be re-shingled (since our painters proved not to be carpenters, which I guess is ok as long as they don't try to be carpenters). We hired carpenter friends from the North Bennett Street School who did a beautiful job putting up the new shingles. It will be a shame to paint them, really.


Here she is, stripped of her old shingles. This green stuff is the original paper beneath the shingles. Also note the pump jacks they built for themselves.

New tar paper! Now she's definitely waterproof.

Here they go, starting bottom up.



It took them a long time to get this bottom portion done because of the curves and corners, but look how beautifully they overlapped the corners and fitted everything together.

The inner corner between the bay and the porch. Each piece had to be custom fit to the curve here.

And done! Also, it smells so good - just standing next to the house you can smell the cedar in the breeze.

If they are brave enough, they will also repair our porch roof.

LIVE THIS SUNDAY AT THE WORCESTER CENTRUM

SEE THE MONSTER TRUCK BATTLE OUR FRONT LAWN!!!

So here is the set-up for a productive weekend:
1. Hire your cousin to regrade your front lawn.
2. Let him rent earth moving equipment.
3. Leave town.

We hired my cousin Doug who runs a landscaping business to go to town on the yard. First step was to regrade the front and back. However, the last time we were a part of a project of this scale with Doug, he broke two bobcats. So rather than stay and fret, we went to Philadelphia for the weekend.

Doug happy, move dirt.

Front lawn begins to resemble my hairline.

This is what I always imagined would happen if we ran afoul of a repo man or something. While we are out of town, somebody shows up in an armored attack vehicle and comes in through the bay window.

Here Doug is removing the remains of the trees we cut down last fall. In order to do this kind of work you are supposed to call Dig Safe before you dig. We did. They came and told us that our water supply ran right under this stump. Then we dug.

Looking pretty great, no? Who wouldn't want to look out their front windows onto a dirt farm. We are hoping to have a Grapes of Wrath party soon.

The dirt removed from the front was deposited into the vast lowlands in the back yard.

Those of you who have been reading this blog from the start will be familiar with our monolith. It showed up the first time we tried to mow the lawn, and has not moved much since. Moving this 2,000 lb. block of granite presented Doug with a great opportunity to bust a piece of expensive equipment so he jumped at the chance.

Build a better mousetrap......


This rock was in place less than an hour before the neighborhood kids showed up to try and kick it over. Bon Chance!

Painting done! (Almost)

The painters finished up with the house this week, except that we have decided that the front bay of the house needs to be re-shingled. So they will have to come back to paint that when it is done. But otherwise it looks great! The colors look good together, and the trim helps to break up the house and bring out the details a bit more. Check it out:

Isn't she cute?

This is the bay that will get re-shingled during the next week or so by our friend Chris Carrot (not his real name).



The porch roof still needs to be repaired and we have to do some other fixings to the porch, so that's why it still looks like crap. But hopefully it won't for too much longer.

Chaos.

Our poor little house is currently in chaos. We had some down time, thus no new updates, but with the warm weather everything has started at once. The house is getting painted, and all of this week and some of last week, the painters have been out scraping it down and patching it up. Here's what it looks like so far:

Of course, the intermittent rain has prolonged the painting of the house, but it should get done by mid-week next week. Hooray! You can see the darker color for the clapboarding below, with the ivory trim, and the lighter yellow above. Reagan actually visually color-matched these colors to what she found in early layers of the paint chips on the house. So we're being somewhat restorative while keeping with the yellow history of the house.
Also note the removal of the shutters...we realize they'd been on the house for a long time, but they're not original, so we took them off.

You can see that they started repairing and replacing some of the shingles. This has been a bit of a problem that Reagan actually lost sleep over. Just in case you're wondering, this is NOT how to replace shingles:


New shingles should not look like the battered, shrunken old shingles - i.e. like they are British and haven't had braces. And they shouldn't be nailed down in the middle of the exposed shingle. Thankfully, the painters are bringing over a carpenter to do a better job next week. Yikes.

In more exciting news, we got our kitchen cabinets delivered! We decided on the beige Ikea cabinets, and they arrived yesterday in a billion pieces. Amazingly, though, we got them organized last night and already have some upper cabinets installed. Also amazing - they fit!

Here they are going in. Also note the newly installed ceiling fan!

The cabinets fit pretty much perfectly across the top of the wall. We were impressed that we managed to get these up in an hour. (An hour past Reagan's bedtime, but still...) We'll put the wall cabinets that go just below these in tonight. Soon...storage! What a great idea for a kitchen!