Adventures in Remodeling - This is Gonna Get Ugly

So when you buy an ugly house, it can only get uglier before it gets better right?  Right?  Ok, so maybe not in all cases but certainly in mine.  This is what my super ugly house looked like when I bought it.

The photo is from the Spokane County website, taken in 2004, not much had changed in appearance when I bought it.

I’m not entirely sure why out of the many many potential homes I looked at, I settled on this.  But, one reason is that I had owned it when I was married and had lost it when I divorced because I simply couldn’t afford to keep it on my own.  It was a sad day, I had so many plans for my home then and now it looked like I was getting another chance.

I sealed the deal in February of 2007 and with keys in hand, started making plans without a clue as to how to do ANY of it or how much it would cost.  I had planned to live there for a very long time so I wanted it to be to my liking but still remodel in a way that would be appealing to a lot of people if I ever had to sell it.  So, with what I wanted and what I thought of as “timeless”, I opened the front door.

After working on some pretty major projects indoors, I thought it was time to move outdoors, sort of backwards, but I needed a place to come home to that was comfortable and functional.  Once I came home from work/school and shut the front door behind me, I cared very little what the outside looked like.  I had my little oasis behind the ugly exterior.

Paint colors.  Oh. My. God.  How I can make something so difficult or why I feel the need to obsess over the PERFECT color, I’ll never know.  I tend to choose colors in shades of green and gray.  And yes, I obsessed about the perfect grayish/greenish color for what seemed like and probably was months.  Every weekend I’d bring home a new sample to try out so I could stare at it for a while and decide if I liked it.

I knew the trim would be white, not the horrid green that you see here, and the yellowy beige had to go.  It was awful, peeling, old, faded, cracked and just plain ugly.  The other thing I knew without a doubt was that the hundred plus year old windows had to go.  As lovely as they were and as much as I wanted to preserve anything original to the house as much as possible, lets face it, windows have come a long way since the turn of the century.  When you have frost on the INSIDE of your windows, you have a problem AND a huge heating bill in the winter.

The picture above only has a few of my paint samples slapped up.  The process of trying out colors went on for some time and I wavered between off white, white white, every shade of white and all the grays and greens I could find that were appealing.  In the mean time, I was dating an architect who also threw in his two cents regarding what color he thought it should be and to appease him, I did try a few of those.  After all the sampling and making my house look like some bizarre quilt, of course on the FRONT, I decided on the very first color that I brought home.  Since bought the same sample twice, I figured it was a sign.

Once I picked the main color, decided on a pure white for the trim, I wanted to add a third accent color in true Victorian fashion but after some debate with my bff at the time, we came to the conclusion that I just didn’t have third color decision making abilities and it was suggested that I do something with the front door to add some color.  I’m pretty sure my friend was beyond frustrated with me and my inability to make a simple decision on the color of a house.  To me though, this was happening once and it needed to be right not only because of the cost involved, but the actual labor.

First things first.  Scrape the hell out of the place and power wash.  NO ONE ever told me what an enormous mess it is to power wash a house.  No one.  And those DIY shows I was glued to never really dealt with it because they sided everything.  Siding was not an option.

I think the dog is even embarrassed...

So while my brother was living with me, I thought it would be a good time to get started since he could help me.  I came home to this.  I was horrified.  My ugly house had actually gotten UGLIER!!  I didn't think it was even possible, but clearly it was.  Not only that, but there were paint chips EVERYWHERE.  My house looked completely ridiculous and sad.

A couple months earlier I had special ordered the windows for the living room and dining room and believe you me, special order windows are not cheap! I decided it was worth it because I didn’t want to change the size or shape and have to redo all the antique trim on the inside of the house.

Dining room windows coming out

The dining room windows came out first.  The living room windows and the dining room windows were the exact same size with the only difference being that the dining room is a bay window.  So out came the old windows and in went vinyl double paned, insulated and properly sealed windows.  The difference was AMAZING.  Not only did they open now (they had been painted shut probably sometime around 1956) but you couldn’t feel air blowing through and around them anymore.  CRAZY!

I had just happened to run into an old friend at the grocery store one day and in chatting with him found that he was between jobs and knew how to do what I needed so in short order I had hired him to replace the windows because it was something that I was completely in the dark about, at that time.  He and my brother had the old windows out and the new ones installed in fairly short order.  The dining room windows were pretty straight forward but when it came to the living room windows the story changed a little bit.  Unlike the dining room that was a bay window, the living room was also three separate windows but a bit of work had to be done to reframe them since in reality, it could have been one GREAT BIG window.  Things were done a little bit different in 1907 as far as windows go, but they boys came up with a plan pretty quick and it only required me to replace four pieces of vertical and more importantly FLAT trim on the inside.

The only window that was kept was the small decorative leaded glass window you can see in the far right of this picture.  Its wavy and beautiful and it just goes with the house.  Its also completely inefficient and gets covered with plastic in the winter but after hours and hours of scraping old paint off of it and cleaning up the led between the small glass pieces it’s actually quite beautiful.

So here also you can see some of the priming (and it ALL had to be done) being done and brother taping off the new window because god forbid he get paint on it.  In this pic, you can also see that the roof had been replaced (since the original 2004 pic) which is also the reason the exterior paint took so long: roofs are also expensive.  More on that in another post.

So after all my wavering and obsessing over color, this is what the house ended up looking like.  New windows, new door, painted porch and foundation and more white trim than I knew the house even had to begin with.  Strange what you find when you start looking.

Just a little bit different.

While painting the upper part, paint was dripped on the roof, which is of course black.  I couldn’t scrub it off and wasn’t in a real big hurry to get on a ladder and keep trying.  I finally took a leftover piece of shingle into what was now my most favorite store ever, Lowes, and had them match it as close as possible.  Exterior flat.  I hung out the window upstairs and painted all the white and gray green spots “roof color”.  It actually worked.

The back of the house took a lot longer to finish because by the time the sides and front were done, I was pretty much over it, my brother had moved out so it was up to me and the Pod to finish it up.  The Pod was pretty much over it too.  There was a LOT to finish mainly because there was a lot more trim than there appeared to be when it was all painted one solid ugly color.  Also, I was still trying to figure out what to do with the dilapidated porch that I’d grown so fond of during the months and months of remodeling that had gone on.  It had held tons and tons of interior demo debris, I had replaced rotting boards, even threw some new indoor/outdoor carpet on it and it was functional.  If I’d have torn it out, there would have been no way to get in or out the back door.  And, it had served me well so I thought I should just let it be for now.

Not a proud moment

There was also the heinous garage that was in desperate need of attention that I just couldn’t deal with financially or physically.  I had hurt my back by falling on the stairs of the house I lived in prior to buying this one and in October of 2008 finally had surgery to fix it which I was happy about, I just couldn’t do a whole lot for a while afterward.

Heinous Garage

Both the garage (including the roof) and the porch have been taken care of by my awesome first tenant who did the painting of the garage and porch rebuild for the cost of a months rent while I provided the materials.  He even figured out what materials were needed in the most cost effective manner possible, went and picked them up with me, loaded and unloaded them. this was not the kind of help I was used to.  I’ll update with a pic as soon as I get one.

So there it is.  It’s gotta get real ugly before it gets pretty.  At least in the world of remodeling and renovating.  Also, it’s kind of amazing how the aesthetic of a house changes when you start bringing out the little details from one hundred years ago with some bright white trim paint.