Catching Up - Farmhouse Projects

In the spirit of catching up my blog from our hiatus over the summer, I thought that I would do this post about some of the projects that we've done around the house. 

Last night, a trio of grandchildren came over and helped decorate the house for Halloween! 

They hauled all of the bins of illuminated pumpkins from the garage and even hooked up all of the extension cords (with the help of Grandpa). We won't carve any real pumpkins until it's closer to Halloween. They might not last otherwise. But we enjoy these fake ones with their different funny faces that come on with the electrical timer at night.

  

They worked pretty hard, 

and it was cold and really windy out.

  

After they were done putting up all of the fun Halloween decor (we don't make anything scary) then we fed them all pizza!  They are cheap labor.

After that, before taking them home,

we drove around town, looking at other people's lit up displays

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In the past two years we have replaced all of the siding on the North and East sides of the house. This summer our task was to do the South Side and just a small portion over on the West side on the front porch that needed it. We have been using the individual strips of clapboard siding called LP Smart Siding. It's warrantied for 50 years and it looks just beautiful compared to vinyl siding. Nice for replacing the original wood, and looks pretty authentic.

A while back, on Ancestry.com, I was researching some of the people who used to live in our house in the 1940s. The Donald and Gracie Allen Family. Magically, someone in their family happened to have posted a photo of our home! 

You can even see the big barn that was in the backyard when this was still farmland before it was annexed to the city, even though we are still on two and a half acres of land. 

If you look really close at this old photo you can see another doorway to the left between the windows of the dining room and the grandkids bedroom. This was the original front door to the house before the other portion to the right was added on.  Yes, at the time this photo was taken, there were 2 front doors.

In the photo below. this is the space with the yellow arrow that other doorway took up. It was the original entrance into that portion of the house before the rest of the home was either moved over or constructed on site. Someone told us it that new right portion was moved here, but other people think it was constructed on site. We don't know. But this first left section of the house in the photo below is the portion that was from the late 1800s. We knew the doorway was under there, because of the patched up cruddy siding on top of it. 

From the inside of the house, in our dining room, where our china hutch is standing, is where the old doorway had originally been. The beam on the ceiling to the left is where the exterior wall of the house had been. When they added the other portion, it's now a large opening into the living room. Underneath that oriental runner rug dividing the two rooms,we can see where the hardwood floors were patched together when it was joined.

Back to the outside--- Here is how awful the siding looked where they had patched in that doorway. We had suspected there wasn't any insulation behind it and condensation moisture was building up between the interior and exterior walls. It was eroding the siding and even causing stain marks and deteriorating the wood. So we knew we needed to address this matter! The rest of the front porch siding is in beautiful condition, because it is protected from the elements and is all the original wood.

Steve started pulling it off. Just as we suspected, there wasn't ANY insulation in there! We almost half expected to find the door in there too. Heck, that would have maybe added another barrier and not made it so susceptible to losing the interior heat if they had left the door in place?  HAHA

Anyhow, he tore off the rest of the siding that had been damaged from moisture. He put in new upright studs because the old opening just had a wobbly board stuck in place and it wasn't even nailed up or supporting anything. Now it was correctly framed in and ready to have new insulation added and then the siding replaced.

Steve was being antsy about wanting to get the siding nailed up and didn't want to wait for me to paint it first! I like to paint the strips of siding first while laying flat on sawhorses. We got it up all into place, and then had to take a break and babysit a grandkid for a few hours.  Oh well, might as put her to work too. 

First we did a coat of primer, and little Claire was dressed in a paint shirt and ready to help. At only 5 years old, and she loves the little roller and paint tray. We put her to work and she rolled primer and then paint as high up as she could reach.

  

We have done so much siding now on the other sides

 that this small portion was really easy.

Done! 

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Now let's move over to the South side of the house. Of course, this side takes the worst beating from the sun. It also was the worst part of the old wood siding with lots of patch marks and big old nails tacked on willy-nilly all over the place. Pretty dang ugly and definitely in need of some improvement.

Before we could begin, we had to dig up all of the hostas that had grown alongside of the house there. They didn't go to waste though, we dug them up and hauled them up to Michigan to my sister's house. She planted them right away around her front porch and really enjoyed getting full-sized plants instead of waiting for little ones to grow up. Hostas are very hearty and transplant well.

We started ripping off the old siding. Underneath, the wood was in really good shape. This is a portion of the home that we think was built in the early 1900s. It's great to see that there weren't any structural defects or problems hiding underneath the siding.  Once he ripped off the siding, then he covered the entire area with a roll of house wrap. 

I am the painter of the family, so Steve hauled out all of the new pieces of LP Smart Siding and laid them out on the sawhorses. That's when I go to work and give it three good coats with a quality exterior primer/paint. I like painting in the dappled shade of the trees in the backyard. I have the radio playing, and Binney is always nearby, supervising.  Once the paint is dry, then we work together as a team to nail it up.

Here is the profile view of the new LP Smart Siding. We love the texture of each piece as it's nailed up into place. Every row is a little bit different. It isn't the same old repeat or fake looking grooves of vinyl siding. This stuff lasts a long time and I'm sure it will outlive us for our lifetime.

We worked on this section of the house earlier in the summer, and it got pretty hot facing the south. We would work for an hour at a time and then take breaks. Steve would stand on one ladder and I would stand on the other, and we would boost the piece of siding up between us. We have a special air nailer gun for siding that only uses a certain amount of pressure. Otherwise a regular air nail gun would drive the nails right through and damage the siding into the row below. It sure is a lot better than pounding a hammer!

And here it is, all done and the shutters put back up into place. I don't think I'm going to plant any more hostas along that side of the house. I think we will just let the grass grow up to the foundation. We gradually sloped the dirt away from the foundation to help with any water intrusion along the basement walls.

I do have hydrangea on the back corner that I protected from our construction. That is a clump of hydrangea I brought from our house in Chilton, which originally came from our log house up on the river in Oconto, which had originally come from my good friend Charlotte who lived down the road from us! It's hard to kill hydrangea, if you dig up enough of the roots and dirt around it and plop it in a new spot, it just takes off and gets bigger and bigger every year.  So this strain has been following along with us since about 1998 or 1999!  I have a bigger more full grown clump in the front on the corner by the front porch. 

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Last summer in 2021, we had installed a new window in our bedroom. That was on the East side of the house. But I never found any shutters the right size to go on each side of the bedroom window. I was not going to pay $49 for a set of plastic shutters from Home Depot! So I've been keeping my eye out and finally found a set of them at the ReStore in Green Bay last week. They were dark brown, and priced at only $2 each! We took them home, and I whipped out my paint, and give them a nice fresh layer of two coats of red.

I also took the time to use up the rest of the gray paint and give a new coat to the floorboards of the front porch, as well as the stairs down to the front sidewalk. A little touch up here and there along on the railings and now our front porch is all spiffy and looking good for a long time.

    

    

While I was painting, Mr Stevio came up with the bright idea that I should also use up the rest of the white paint that was in the garage after painting all of that siding. There wasn't that much left and he said I should use it up before winter. He wanted to get all of the freezable items out of the garage. So I MUST use up the rest of the white paint. Of course he would say that, he's not the one doing the painting! So since I had to use it up, I decided to get a thick napped roller and add one more coat of paint to the cedar shake siding that is on the exterior walls of my She Shed.

I wasn't sure how much paint I had left, but I figured if I started in the worst part I could get at least far enough to make it look presentable. Before I knew it, I had enough to do all the way around!

So now the exterior of the She Shed is all spiffied up! This was originally a single stall attached garage and mud room onto the old portion of the farmhouse. Now it is my She Shed that is full of my looms, quilting machines and quilting frame, and our most relaxing mission recliner chairs. We spend more time in the She Shed than we do in the living room!

While I was painting the She Shed, Steve was able to mount up the last two shutters on each side of the bedroom window to the left. Here is a wide-angle shot of the little backyard that is fenced in for Binney's potty yard. The bulkhead doors down to the basement look kind of bright in this picture below, but they are the same color as the shutters and the little table and benches on the patio. 

Now the backyard is finished and all of the shutters are up. We really can't get any shutters to fit around that little kitchen nook in the middle because the windows are so tight to the corners of the house. So we will have to appreciate them the way they are and not have red shutters in that portion of the house

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That is enough blogging for today, I will go over this and check for typos and then hit publish. Although the backyard looks beautiful gazing out from the She Shed, it's very windy and cold. It's only 44° at noon today. And it's not going to get much warmer. They are talking about some freezing rain or snow. I think winter is coming sooner than we expected. Those heavy gray clouds in the background look like snow clouds to me!

So that's my update on the exterior house projects that we worked on this summer. 

Now you know why we were so busy and I didn't get around to blogging!