Landscaping The Front Yard

You may recall what the house and our front landscaping looked like when we bought it back in 2010, under snow.  We're kind of terrible about remembering to take before shots, before we rip things down, so this is the before shot that you get.

Last fall we ripped out the big tree, that was eating the front corner of the house and all of the lilies that had taken over our front yard.  We waited until spring to rip out the bushes under the front bedroom window, the lilac on the side and the lilac out front that was literally planted on the sidewalk.

We decided we wanted something to cover that ugly meter out front and to flank the sides of the front portion of the house that juts out.  We also wanted some foundation plants to help cover up the cement area of the foundation that stands out.  We ended up with some arborvitae (that won't get enormous), goldmound spirea, and some grasses in between.  Then we knew we wanted a feature, so we went with a redbud tree, but made sure it had plenty of room between it and the house, so we don't run into the issue we had with that giant evergreen.  We also decided that the small round arborvitae looked great next to our new slatty railing. I look forward to them growing in a little bit more and to all the lights on them during the holidays.

Mudroom Phase 2, Cabinets

Sorry folks! We've taken quite the break from projects and posts for some time!  After many months of debate and saving up for cabinets, we finally pulled the trigger.  We contacted my friend Sarah, who gave us our great handyman, since she had cabinets made for her kitchen by a wonderful Amish man, Jonas Weaver.  So, we wrote him a letter and settled on a mutual date to meet.  We drove about an hour to meet with him at his home and shop and then brought him to our house to measure. After a about four weeks we were lucky to have these beauties installed by Jonas and his son.  We're thrilled to have all the extra storage and plan to finish up the handles and the counter top sometime this spring.

Slatty

Now that it is spring, we can turn our attention to the outside of our house, specifically the original wrought iron railings at our front and side entrances. If you look closely you can see the heart shapes in the metal. Yuck.  After falling in love with some inspiration (below) found on Apartment Therapy, we decided that we could tackle this project.

 

Inspiration at Apartment Therapy

First, we decided it would be best to paint the cement so we wouldn't see it as much through the slats.  The first color, this flesh type tone, turned out to be terrible, so we went back and had them tint it a darker brown. (You'll see it darker in a couple of the photos below.) Then Matt went to work building the structure for the railings. This task involved drilling 4 inch deep holes in solid concrete, not a fun job but Matt got to buy a hammer drill so that made him happy.



I worked on sanding and staining the cedar slats.  There were way too many to count.

After they dried, Matt started putting them up. Here is some of his work in progress.

After a few more slats and some trim, we were done. A relatively quick and easy project.

Basement Insulation

Since it is winter, we are relegated to indoor projects that don't involve busting through exterior walls or windows, which lead us to the least sexy of our projects, insulating our basement.  Since buying the house, we had always planned on eventually finishing the basement, but the project timeline got bumped up because of a limited term incentive program the City's energy efficiency office that helped us to increase our energy savings by about 20%.  To start, we had a blower door test done by a Home Performance with EnergyStar auditor who determined that the best bang for our buck would be to insulate the basement and airseal the rimjoist.She also suggested replacing the water heater because it wasn't properly vented. Luckily we were starting with a blank slate with no demo needed.

The plan was to adhere 1" XPS foam insulation to the basement walls and tape the seams to provide an air and moisture barrier then frame, insulate, install electrical, and drywall. The first challenge was getting all of the materials home in our little car and into the basement. As you can see the basement quickly became a disaster zone

 Slowly but surely, we worked our way around the basement insulating and framing.

 Then came the drywall, our arch enemy. In theory drywall should be simple. Measure, make a cut or two, screw in place. Somehow between cutting and screwing in place things get messed up by an 1/8 of an inch and I end up cutting again. Despite this challenge and the copious amounts of drywall dust that it generates, after a couple of weeks our basement looks like this.

Like I said, not sexy, but the room is noticeably warmer and  it brings us one step closer to having a truly finished basement.

Mudroom

As you may recall, we closed up a doorway in the kitchen during that remodel and busted a hole into the porch/soon to be mudroom.  Here are the original photos of the porch:

Notice the lovely window into our living room

 

In one quick weekend Matt was able to transform the porch to this:

We worked with our favorite handyman Dave, to rebuild the porch.  From framing, HV/AC window install, siding and drywall, just a quick couple of weeks, and we were here:

All we needed to do after this was add the barn door, cork flooring (we used Lumber Liquidators) and our special lighting, vintage from Grandma and Grandpa Wachter. Here's the mud room in the current state:

We plan to add some cabinets and storage bench sometime early next year, so stay tuned...

Kitchen Renovation : Completed

After three short months we went from this:

To this:

Next up, building a mudroom out of a porch