Busy summer doing nothing

One of my only pet peeves about working from home are the number of times I work all day, but it doesn’t appear I’ve DONE anything.  I may be working on the computer or I may be doing laundry, but when you walk in the house, it looks like I was eating bon bons all day.  Well, that pet peeve happened all summer when it came to the house.

We spent hundreds of hours on the house this summer, but when you come by it doesn’t look like we did anything.  You may be able to tell we did something, but it doesn’t appear to be enough.  So, what did we do, exactly??  Well..

We removed the vinyl siding.  This was a huge amount of work.  The siding had been added (we think in the 90’s) over the original wood siding.  It covered original wood work, covered moisture problems we knew existed, and just didn’t fit the house.  Result of hours of work removing siding – original wood siding with peeling, chipped paint.  The house actually looked WORSE after removing the siding.

Removing the siding

On the plus side, we discovered that there was originally crown molding above the windows that had been removed when the vinyl was added, so we were able to duplicate and replace that detail.

You can see where the crown molding above the window was cut down to allow for the vinyl siding.

We removed the closed “pop-out” that was added on.  We’re not sure when this was added, but think it must have been around the same time as the vinyl siding as there wasn’t any wood siding underneath.  This was also time consuming, extremely difficult work.  The result?  The house looks like it should look.

The house before….way way before

Pop out added for closet space – Before

This is from a different angle, but you can see the pop-out is there without the siding like a sore thumb

And, here it is without the ugly pop out

Now, you may look at that last photo and think “Wow!  What an amazing transformation!”  Well, that picture only tells part of the story.  Here is the un-cropped photo:

Arg

So, now you can see why I feel like it doesn’t look like we did much all summer.

That torn up porch you see?  We thought it was in pretty good shape, but it turns out that the entire porch was just barely hanging on.  We ended up having to jack up the porch and install all new support members.  See the new wood posts underneath?  No?  You didn’t notice?  Oh, that’s because it’s yet another job that you don’t SEE, but needed to be done.

This porch is all jacked up! We lifted this corner nearly 2 inches.

Oooooh! Posts!!!

We also replaced the porch roof and the roof on the back of the house.  Thousands of dollars of work that needed to be done, but you can’t tell we did anything.  You also can’t tell that hubby made ME crawl in the “attic” of the porch to run electric.  I had to balance on two support beams all the way around to run the electric so I didn’t fall through the ceiling.  I was like Spiderman, I tell ya!

I had to CRAWL in there!

I can’t even begin to express how much yard clean up we have done.  And it still looks like crap.

Barn corral before

Barn corral after

Dog kennel before

Dog kennel after

I have to admit that looking at these pictures actually helps me see how much work we DID do.  Proof that if you are ever getting into a big before and after type project, taking pictures along the way can do good things for your soul.  However, the pictures also show lots of work that is not quite done.  Sure, things look better, but we aren’t there yet.

To cheer me up…here’s a cute picture of kitties:

Kitties!