Exterior house painting, a work in progress

Here's a photo of the rear of the house, taken from the edge of the vegetable garden. This is a work in progress: only the "body" paint is done, so the shingles and trim (including the belly bands) are not painted yet. They will make a substantial difference in the visual appearance of the place. Even so, it's quite striking at this point. We decided to NOT go with a green color, because we will be planting all kinds of shrubberies around the house and (curiously enough) they will be mostly green-colored most of the year. The body color we chose: Burnt Umber. Whew, at least that decision is done. But since the trim color(s) are not laid down yet, there's still time to agonize over them. . . . .

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Here's a photo of the west side of the house, showing how the stone works with the paint color. There will be some back-fill done to hide at least some of the concrete foundation. We're not sure how to treat the rest. Maybe paint it, too.

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This is a different photo of the west side of the house, looking south:

Some background on the color choices...

One of our subcontractors said that we should go with a lighter color to make the house look bigger, since we've paid a lot of money for this place. But our decisions have been mostly centered around how the building will fit into its surroundings. We could've gone with green, as mentioned earlier, but: (1) there are about 10^9 variations on green; and (2) we're going to have lots of plants around the house which are going to be a lotta green anyway. The trim bits can be changed as we discover how things work here. That also has been a theme -- in a lot of cases we don't know what will work out in the end, so we are keeping our options open.

BTW, the Fir doors for the main level have arrived. We will post photos of them soon. The doors will be subject of a blog all to themselves, because we sourced them ourselves--with some substantial money savings. Our approach may work for some, but it all depends on having a good building-materials recycling place around. We can elaborate on that in the door post.

Lots of activity

First, here you can see one of the new garage doors that was just installed this week. We will have them painted to look a little more wood-like: they eventually will have some faux hardware to make them look a bit like carriage house doors.

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Here's a shot of our "paint library" we've got going. So far, 10 different paint samples (and counting). Hopefully we are close to making a decision. Lisa is going to revisit the site in the next day or so, after the paint has had a chance to dry out more, to see what they look like. At our builder's suggestion, each of us wrote down a list of paint colors in preferences #1 to #5, without telling the other, and then compared. We were different, but not too far off. More later....


Along with garage doors and paint, the cabinets have arrived! Here's a shot of the kitchen cabinets. And earlier this week we decided on the hardware (drawer/cabinet pulls). There were a few "Oops" things with the cabinets: the upstairs built-ins came with the wrong wood variety for the tops, and the built-ins around the family room fireplace were too wide to accommodate any kind of stone wrap around the fireplace. Both are being addressed.

Fast & furious

Our stonemasons have finished putting our Western Cascades stone in place and are now grouting it. We went with a medium-gray color for the grout so it wouldn't compete with the stone. Western Cascades is not a brand name, by the way. We have been doing some investigation into the region where the quarry is, and we think that the stone was erupted by a Western Cascades volcano. The Western Cascades predate the modern high Cascades, having ceased erupting at about the time the great Basalt Floods started occurring; so the stone probably is more than 17 million years old. The Western Cascade range also was west of the current high Cascades. There are a number of theories about this, but I won't go into that here: we have more house-related stuff to talk about!

Here's a grouted column on the front porch. There will be a wood wrap above the stone.

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So, now that the stone is done, we are thinking about the exterior house colors. I found a program which allows you to play with different color combinations. You create masks which define where different colors go, and then "paint" away on your computer. Here are a couple of examples, showing different color combinations on the back of the house:



Finally, although I don't have any more pretty pictures, there are a LOT of changes that are going to happen in the next week. The garage interior has been painted, and the main house interior is being painted right now; that will be done in another few days. The garage doors are slated to be installed early next week, followed by the kitchen cabinets and hardwood floors. We have figured out that we have enough Ipe flooring to do both levels, IF we do something else in the bathrooms, utility room, main-level foyer/hall and kitchen. That nice slate we got will go in the foyer/hall/kitchen, and we probably will put tile in the bathrooms. We probably will put Marmoleum in the utility room.

So the pace is definitely picking up! Currently, our builder thinks we will be able to move into our new house in March, and, based on how things are going, that seems pretty likely. Then we get to work on the landscaping....

Progress -- stone, paint; mud

Here's about 1 day's progress on putting up the stone we so laboriously gathered and washed. We think it's starting to look pretty good. Although not shown in this photo, the roof shingles we chose for the house are a good match for the stone. The posts will also have a stone wrap about 46" high, to match the height of the stone in the porch. The hunk of plywood is placed to intercept water falling ~12 feet from a rain gutter and keep it from splashing mud onto the stone. Once the stone is up and grouted, the roofers will come back in and finish installing the downspouts.

This is a photo showing the painting going on in the garage. This is the single-width (or Tandem) portion of the garage. We went with Metro White paint; it's pretty good paint, for a pretty good price.

And lastly, here's a shot of my recent labors with the tractor. The area next to the old barn has been pretty badly trashed by the heavy vehicle traffic, with very deep ruts in mud. We recently got several loads of wood chips from a landscaping company and put some of them to use alongside the barn. Not shown: lotsa rain coming down, although it is pretty obvious from the puddles in the driveway.

Back patio; 'fun' in the rain

Our new concrete patio! Lisa is trying out the steps. In the original layout, the steps really dominated the patio -- they ended up about halfway into the patio. We thought it really reduced the usability of the patio so they shrunk the steps down to the minimum permitted by code. We will put a small handrail up, to satisfy code requirements. The photo was taken at about 6PM on a rainy afternoon so I had to use the flash.

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And below you can see our latest project: washing all that inexpensive stone we got out of a local quarry. The stone will form a rock veneer on the front of the living room exterior; you can see the scratch coat behind Lisa.

So far we have handled each piece of stone at least 4 times. Multiply by 5 tons. Ooh my back...

And, yes, it's raining; Lisa is wearing a modified trash bag to try to keep some of the rain off. What fun!