One Last Post about the Porch

To say we've been basking in screen porch glory is a little bit of an understatement. All the work we accomplished in the waning days of summer last year felt good to get scratched off our list (HERE), but it wasn't until this year that we finally got the furniture rearranged, the pillows fluffed, the rugs down, the planters planted, and we could really use the space. It's been nice to end the work day here with a drink and a conversation with your sweetie, or begin the weekend with a cup of coffee and birdsong. 

I had a few more views of the screen porch to share, and then I'll move on to other parts of the house, because Tom and I have gotten a lot done since I was last blogging regularly (and all that work was part of the reason I wasn't blogging regularly). Remember this oldie but ugly? 

That chair used to be in my living room, and was a rocker from the home I grew up in. I've decided its wood form is not so bad as patio furniture, but I have plans to recover it with a slightly less loud fabric. It's a really comfortable chair, so I hate to give it up entirely. It's sitting in one corner of the screen porch to the left of the sliding glass door into the kitchen. 

On the other side of the sliding glass door into the kitchen is an old bar cart I found in the basement and repainted. I'll admit for the most part it's just filling space, though the bottom shelf does keep my flower vases handy for when I'm cutting flowers from the garden. 

I am in love with this golden ceiling, made of stained grooved 1X8 car siding. It's a cheap material, but it diffuses light in a warm way that makes the porch seem shaded and cozy without being dark. I'm less in love with the light/fan, but the price was right (free, from a fixture replacement project at my mother's house), and we can upgrade later when we find something we really like. 

On the exterior, we went from this: 

To this:

A proper gutter on the front wall of the porch means no more rotting foundations. My summer plants are just getting started on the patio, but we are already enjoying the strings of porch lights in the evening. 

Next up: A much smaller project, at the front of the house. 

Updating that Chapter About the Screen Porch

There's a better picture at the end of this chapter!

It's June! Screen porch weather here in the Midwest. Which brings me right back to the last time I was blogging semi-regularly, in October, about what evolved into a multi-month repair job on....the screen porch. 

I've imagined the story of my porch's construction before, and I will share it again because I believe it to be true: two guys got drunk on a couple of cases of Natty Light and decided to build a screen porch out of whatever shit they could find laying around. 

That was maybe 20 years or so ago. Add the insult of many years of bad patchy roofing repairs, a leaky or non-existent gutter, and the natural processes of sun and rain, it was something of a miracle (or just plain habit) it was still standing. 

Going back a bit, I've written about how we (we being me and Tom, but let's be honest: it was mostly Tom) spent most of August and September of last year, HERE, and HERE, tearing into the rot and getting the place sound again. Going even further back, we have my superficial attempts at coping with the ugly HERE.

I'm still having some technical difficulties blogging in anything resembling an organized fashion, because in May I had no less than FOUR college students' worth of stuff show up from two colleges, and one of those students (my oldest, Grant) commenced from his university. So he was moving out of his apartment digs in a serious and permanent fashion. Where does one land? Mom's place. More specifically, her basement, her guest room, her garage. AND her screen porch. I've been waiting to get some photos decent enough to write around, and I'm still finding it necessary to do it in weird stages because of stacked boxes, trailers of kayaks (don't ask) and the flotsam and jetsam of daily life.

A sneak peak at the new ceiling: 

So what you're getting here is interior shots. But only part of it. Once the transitional nonsense of my spring is over, I'll blog the rest. It's not that I intended this to turn into "screen porch, strip-tease edition", emphasis on the tease, but it's just been that crazy around here. If I waited until my life was sane, you'd never read about it here again. 

Here's some honesty about "I-don't-give-a-crap-any-more-what-it-looks-like-I-just-want-it-done" renovation choices: the screen porch floor. The porch was built on slab, which was probably the only thing the original builders got right. But then they glued down lavender-mauve carpet that was not intended for exterior applications and all the fun you can imagine happened. It rained, the carpet got wet around the edges of the porch. It got hot, the humidity made the carpet rank and smelly. It had to go. And it went, more easily than I thought, considering how many home improvement horror stories that I've read about glued carpet that seemed more or less permanent up to and including the Apocalypse. 

It had baked in the sun to a brittle crisp, and the carpet peeled up fairly well enough. But. (There's always one more 'but' in these stories, isn't there?) while it made the carpet easy to get up, it also meant that the glue that had hardened to the floor was really ON there. That glue was stuck to the floor like, well, glue. 

So I sanded. And when I sanded, some of it came up, but some of it got hot with the friction and remelted into a sticky substance (like glue, maybe, mmmmm?) and gummed up the sand paper. Then I sanded with a wheel sander with a metal brush, and it heated up the old glue if I went over one patch too many times, and also threw sparks around, which made me super nervous. The idea of spreading chemicals around to dissolve it made me nervous too. 

Tired, nervous, impatient, and failing is not a good combination for doing a thorough job. I reasoned that if we left the glue alone, it was mostly in the corners, it was hard like an enamel or varnish coating. Let's just paint the damn thing, glue and all, and be done with it. Please. 

So that's what I did. Brown concrete patio paint, two thick coats. That brought the entire interior project to this: re-paneled walls and ceiling, repainted and rewired, windows reframed (but not replaced), new sills, and a finally finished (one way or the other) floor. 

The floor is not perfect. Then again, it's a concrete patio floor. I can't say I've cared two cents about its imperfection since we moved the furniture back in. And I so wanted to move in I started playing before I was even finished, like this: 

You can see the concrete-and-carpet-glue floor before sanding in the above shot. And the ceramic planters. Because that was really what all this work was really about-- getting those out of storage, finally. 

Everything you see is stuff I already had--8-year-old (with the original cushions, a little faded) Target all-weather wicker arm chairs, the weird little table I dragged all the way home from Kudzu Antiques in Decatur, Georgia. The hanging lamp, wire shelf (in the window) and ceramic planters I'd picked up over time and squirreled away for the right place. The little cactuses in terra cotta belong to my son Grant; I'm babysitting them while he's in between apartments. 

The area rug is a bit on the small side, but it was one I'd ordered from Overstock a couple of years ago for the front foyer. It was too thick to clear the swing of the front door and I was too cheap and lazy to ship it back. I stored it, figuring it would find a place when I needed a rug. And it did. 

I'm not a big fan of design folks talking about "use what you have" decorating like it's some gloriously free thing, because it isn't really. I mean, at one time or another you paid for it, whether you got it new or whether you got it second-hand. So while, yes, all these were pieces I already had, that does represent some years of acquiring and accumulating. It also represents the patience it took to wait until they had the right space to move into. Tom's carpentry skills (mostly) and my painting/staining/cleaning made all of the pieces fit together, and seem like home. 

In the coming weeks, I ought to be more organized (here's hoping), and will share more of the finished project, including exterior views and some new developments on the outdoor patio. Until next time!

Tackling the Sad Porch (Part Two)

This is going to be the quickest of quicky "during" project posts, because the truth is I'm avoiding beginning the housework and baking that needs to be done for 12+ Thanksgiving guests. But that's the way I usually roll. Procrastination is the last refuge of the lazy and introverted. And I am both.

The sad porch, as it turns out, was sadder than Tom and I thought.

I think the only thing holding it up on one of the corners was inertia and habit. A badly done roof job and an absence of a proper gutter aimed rain water straight at the foundation of the porch, and a series of wet summers had turned the foundation to weak wood-fiber sponge. It was a little scary.

Tom started in tearing it back to the studs so he could see what needed replacing. (He is the hero of this story, by the way). After shoring up the rotten parts with solid, dry, new supports, he re-sided the outside. We left the windows in place, because tearing it completely out wasn't in the plan, if we could avoid it.

It seems like such a small start in this photo, but the clean, primed siding looked so much better than the old rot it seemed a little miraculous at the time.

Here's Tom at work doing trim. Notice the repaired fascia/roofline. It was beginning to look marginally attractive at this point, even with so much left to do.

Uh, yeah. The interior also needed love. Lots and lots of love. We used the same siding vertically in the inside of the porch as inexpensive paneling.

We also stained several miles of it to use as the interior porch ceiling. 

We really earned our bourbon (er, lemonade) that day. 

Here is the porch ceiling going in: 

Painting has commenced in this photo, but we're still working out little trim, caulking, and interior details. 

And now I must go pretend I like housecleaning. I'll be back post-T-day with the "after" of the screen porch project. In the meantime, I wish you all plenty of turkey, gravy, dinner rolls, pumpkin pie, and football, or whatever makes it your four-day weekend of bliss. See you soon!

The Sad Porch (Part One)

It is true that I did not completely lead with my practical mind when I bought Ruth (my house). I'm a romantic about houses, and of course that's dangerous to one's sanity and bank account. 

One of her many charms is that she has a screen porch. Screen porch! For Midwesterners, this is a short form of saying "my house allows me to be outside in the summer without being eaten alive by mosquitoes." Also, "my house has a room that becomes a walk-in refrigerator/freezer just in time for the holidays, and thank goodness, because there's no room to put Aunt Lydia's cranberry jello salad in the fridge."

That's where the practical side ends. Screen porches on old houses should also be like a misty, out-of-focus photo from a back issue of Victoria Magazine. They should have vases of fresh flowers, and white wicker, and ladies with dark hair (that would be me) reading Edith Wharton while sipping lemonade from vintage glassware. 

But I have described my screen porch's quality and construction before, thusly: two guys got drunk on a couple of cases of Natty Light and decided to build a screen porch out of whatever shit they could find laying around. 

About as far from Edith Wharton and fresh flowers as you can get. Add to this a smelly fungal sponge of an old carpet, and sickly shades of "old bruise" mauve and dirty pink beige paints, and it was pretty depressing. And frequently in the beginning used to store stuff during ongoing home-improvement issues elsewhere. 

I am not proud. 

I would also like to mention, for posterity, the clusters of fake plastic ivy the previous owners hung up there to make it festive. 

Over the last five years, I was basically putting lipstick on the pig by painting out the murky purple with leftover paint from other projects, and telling myself that keeping it clean and tidy out there was enough. 

But I saw rot on the exterior siding of the porch and knew it was just a matter of time before I was going to have to get serious about it. Then along came the new dude in my life, and one day this summer Tom took a crowbar to the outside of it. 

It was just as bad as I thought, and worse. And it ended up being what we (and by we I mostly mean he, because he totally wore the superhero cape on this one) worked on for the better part of our summer weekends. 

I'll be back with a progress/part two post soon!

No More Sad Door!

Remember when this happened?

My broken sliding patio door. That was in August. I've been living with it since then.

Even before it was broken, it was a leaky, builder's grade (or worse) door, with "curious" installation issues.

My house isn't that green. This is a weirdly-colored photo

Granted, part of that was my fault because I take forever to make a decision about large purchases. I really agonize over them. Since the screen porch (and a glass storm slider on the outside) protected the door from being either dangerous or leaky, I just let it ride. Winter in Iowa is a terrible time to do window and door replacement, too.

But it also was depressing. It made my kitchen seem trashy and uncared for in a big way, I was embarrassed when I had company over, and spending time in my kitchen gave me the sads. I know I'm going to sound a little overly tragic and possibly whiny by saying this, but I think the door was one of the factors in my winter blues this year. Seriously.

When I checked out patio doors at the big box stores, I wasn't enthused about their products; some of them seemed suspiciously low-cost. Installation could be purchased too, but those are subcontracted out and I had no idea who would be working on my house. I wasn't crazy about the store getting to decide that part. And sales people didn't seem particularly knowledgeable about their product, which made me nervous.

I also got a few bids from large-scale roofing/window/door companies, and got discouraged. Don't get me wrong. None of them were bad people, or bad contractors. But they are too big for their britches and do bulk ordering of just one or two lines of products. I decided I didn't want vinyl-clad windows or doors in a 1930s house. I just didn't. They may be what's economical. They may be "what everyone else is getting." But it wasn't right for my house, and in talking to just two contractors I got tired of being told why what I wanted wasn't what they wanted to sell me. It was also clear they didn't want little one-off jobs like mine. And the bids for the labor part were priced accordingly. Unreasonably high. Like they wanted their bids to be rejected. I think they did.

So I did. But that didn't leave me any closer to finding a) a patio door and b) an installer. In February I finally found a place, north of town, which is part of a small local chain of construction supply stores. They deal mostly with people in the trades, but also do business directly with homeowners. They have a recommended list of installers. They have people who actually know the products they sell, and explained it to me thoroughly, and were happy to price out several different options.

This wasn't the cheapest option of all the places I looked. But look at this!

Is that not the most beautiful thing you've ever seen? It was to me. I sorta peeked around the edge of the kitchen doorway, not knowing what I'd think, and......I actually had to stifle a few tears. The installation dude probably thinks I don't get out enough.

The green in this picture is much closer to real life. 

Clearly I've got some painting to do, and yes, my kitchen floor still needs replacing. But wow, wow, WOW.  I'm so glad this is done!

A Completely Non-Christmasy Update: Painting

Uh, hi. Been awhile, hasn't it?

Sorry about that.

After I painted my foyer, I had my sister and her clan here for the week of Thanksgiving, and that also included a guest dog, my oldest son home from college, and some drop-in visits by cousins.

It was busy, crowded, and noisy, there were lots of shoes piled near the front door, and great big pans of food on the kitchen stove. My coffee pot was in use non-stop and truth be told, my wine corkscrew was too. Meaning the whole thing was pretty dang near perfect as holidays go.

But with all my October travel and November company, I didn't really wrap up the exterior painting season on the blog.

And that's because with all my October travel and November company, I didn't really wrap up the exterior painting season in real life, either.

I left the south side looking almost exactly like it did in the spring:

But partly because I decided I wanted to concentrate on areas of the house I saw when I looked out the windows, like the patio area: 

And the front of the garage: 

The summer, between work, kids' schedules, and rain, didn't allow for much else. In a fit of frustration I slapped some paint on the screen porch: 

And I spent much of the rest of the time reglazing windows, a job that while necessary, wasn't a big show-boat noticeable improvement. 

I also had a handyman spend a day patching a rotten area of siding and a dry-rotted windowsill:

Progress, as I've said before, is progress. And writing this blog post is as much an exercise in realizing that as sharing with readers. During the summer I was too frustrated with the pace and weather delays to feel like ANYTHING was happening. Now I feel pretty good about it, and when April comes I'll be ready to start in again. 

For now though, I'm happy to just contemplate the idea from the comfort of my sofa. 

Fast Vintage Kitchen Cart Rehab

We've been up to two things, mainly, around here in the last two weeks.

1. Rain. No additional explanation necessary.

2. Rock. This kind:

My second oldest, Noah, is involved in a summer School of Rock program every year, and it's been a blast. He's the one in the center of the above photo.

So, while waiting for it to stop raining (again) and between rehearsals and practice, I tackled a small project, this kitchen cart, which was lurking around the basement storage room when we moved in:

It was rust on the tops of the shelves, and spider egg cases under the shelves. Ick.

I was really more in the mood initially for a vintage bar cart for the screen porch, but they are another item that have gotten trendy, and therefore expensive. Also, for a screen porch I wanted something a little more sturdy and little less precious. It needed to take the extremes of temperature and a little abuse. Enter the rusty kitchen cart.

In fifteen minute intervals here and there over the last couple of weeks, I dismantled, cleaned, and sanded the cart:

I had a can of spray paint that looked like the old matte gold color of many mid-century metal decor items, but ran out before I got it all done, only to find that they had discontinued that color. You know, AFTER I'd started the project. Forehead slap.

The closest color I found was more dark bronze, which wasn't what I was going for, exactly, but it was close enough, and I was not wanting this to be a production of hunting down the precise color. I wanted it to be done, not another project waiting indefinitely. And, as my brother-in-law likes to say, "It ain't goin' to the fair."

But as I was putting on a second coat, I realized that spraying the darker color around the edges of the shelves and letting the overspray shade into the center, I had a more realistically vintage looking effect than just one solid color would have been anyway:

Happy accidents. Let's hear it for those!

I put it in the corner near the door of the screen porch, which had looked like this before:

And here's the after:

To protect the top I added a vintage tray:

The tiki fork and spoon are in rough shape. They were $1 items from a box of estate auction junk at a flea market. I cleaned them and sanded them a little, but they need restaining and a little additional work. However, I just decided to hang them to get them up off the floor and out of the way, and I have a feeling they'll probably hang there awhile before I get back to them. So for now, we're just going to say they have "patina." Alright? okay. 

While exterior painting remains the goal (c'mon Mother Nature!), this project is getting me a little closer to making the screen porch a place I actually want to spend time in. 

That's a good thing, even if it isn't on the official schedule.