The real hurry, however, is that if it isn't "livable" by December, I won't have insurance anymore! The past two weeks, it has actually started to feel possible to be living in at least a couple rooms by then...maybe just without a kitchen (good thing mom and dad are 2 miles away....). My dad is wiring the house, heating/air vents are in, and pluming should start soon. New windows finally arrived, which was holding up starting on the roof and replacing the gable shingles. I decided to live on the wild side and go with red and brown windows. The gable end windows are replacements (I will paint the white ones on the first floor)
- 1.jpg (263.12 KiB) Viewed 1041 times
- 6.jpg (388.82 KiB) Viewed 1041 times
I am painting the front windows until I can afford custom wooden windows. The white trim you see will be brown (inspired by Sagamore in the Great Camp in the Adirondacks). I just pulled the aluminum framing from the vinyl windows to expose the original wood frame, and (don't judge me!) those mutins are fake...painted on to make it look like 4 over 4. It was a crazy experiment and sounds tasteless, but it actually doesn't look too bad, even up close.
- 5.jpg (334.58 KiB) Viewed 1041 times
My awesome mason also figured out how to tackle something that was really intimidating. To connect the 1950s addition to the original house, the PO basically took a sledge hammer to the exterior wall and then cased it in with a door. When we removed the door, we discovered that there was literally just a jagged hole in the wall and these huge stones were just barely hanging on in the doorway. Fitting stone back in would have been extremely costly, difficult and labor intensive. We decided to use up the leftover original bricks (used the rest to restore the original fireplace from which they were removed) and brick in the jagged edge to make a smooth edge, thus supporting the existing stones. He also mixed in a few stones to create a less jarring look.
We also had to fill in the old exterior window (which is now interior)to use it to hide new duct work (on the right of the photo). My mason used a different mortar spacing so that we could still "see" the old window rather than blend it into the existing wall completely.
- 8.jpg (362.91 KiB) Viewed 1041 times
From the 1950s addition looking at the old exterior wall into the old part of the house. You can see the jagged stone edge on the right, with new brickwork filled in. They had to do the same downstairs.
On the left, the column is short because that is actually part of the original window, so I left the "window" open into the new doorway. Since I took the photo, he has also filled in above the new header in the doorway.
- 7.jpg (324.84 KiB) Viewed 1041 times
