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porch & exterior, part 7:
painting the house!
completing the transformation from crack house to
hall house
The day we first saw our
house, it looked something like this:
This is the house you all
saw when we sent you those first pictures. This is the house that made
you all question our sanity. This is the house that made you wonder if
perhaps we'd finally bitten off more than we could chew.
This is not the house we
saw.
Looking back, we know it
was love at first sight because we didn't even notice the terrifically
awful porch rebuild. The big, ugly blue apartment building next door?
Completely oblivious. And there was an ugly aluminum clothesline on one
side of the house that never registered. All we saw was the house of our
dreams. Which isn't to say that we didn't realize all the work the house
needed -- we did. It just didn't matter.
Since then, the initial
flush of excitement that comes with any new relationship has...well, not
exactly dissipated, but it's been replaced by a more complete
understanding of what our commitment meant. But as with any good love
affair that's destined to last forever, I'm happy to say that our love for
our house has only deepened in the intervening years as we've poured our
heart and soul into it, not in spite of all the work we've had to
do, but because of it. And that love has transformed this house,
slowly but surely, into our home.
But getting it to this
point, as you can imagine, took work. When the contractor finished
priming, we had to wait a few weeks for several heavy rainstorms to pass
and a commercial project on his list to be finished. I don't know who
watched the weather reports more closely during those weeks, them or us.
But finally, the forecast predicted a week of cool, gray, but thankfully,
dry weather and by the time I left that Monday morning, the painters were
setting up for the final stage. By the end of the week, the house and all
the trim was painted.
In honor of our house's
extreme makeover, we decided the house numbers were in need of a little
facelift, too. They're the porcelain tiles that you'll find on old houses
all over Portland, that started appearing in
the 30s, so of course we were saving them! They'd been splattered with
paint during some previous house painting adventure and the black paint on
the numbers had chipped and faded. I cleaned everything thoroughly,
and using some black enamel porcelain paint from a craft store, very
carefully re-painted each of the numbers (the paint required baking in the
oven, as well). I also spray-painted the metal frame black just to sharpen
it up a bit. We were pleased with the result.
To save money on the work,
we opted to paint the front door and the front and back porch floors
ourselves (that's why the front porch isn't painted in the third finished
house picture at the bottom -- it was taken before we'd painted it). We
also chose to paint the screens ourselves (because they were yet to be
built), yet another way to save money.
The
front door was going to be a different color than the other three --
purple, natch -- and for what it would cost for them to do a fourth color,
it was an easy way to save money.
The painters were nice
enough to mask off the front door window for us, although we had to tear
off the masking they'd done of the door handle and lock in order to get
into the house. Turned out nice, donchya think? And notice our shiny new
doorknocker? That was actually a Christmas gift from Dad and Malinda a few
years ago, one that we had our eye on for awhile with our beloved
Claddagh and the
traditional Irish welcome, "Cead Mile Failte", or "One Hundred Thousand
Welcomes" in Gaelic.
As for the porch floors,
we wanted to use an actual porch paint, which would've been charged as a
fourth color since it was a different kind of paint than the rest (even
though it was the same color as the house body) and since we already had
some not-so-minor finish work to do on the front porch and we needed to
rebuild the back porch stairs, we decided to save money there, too.
But even though those
things weren't yet done (read about them
here), seeing the house in the colors we picked out that first month
after we moved in -- when we went to the beach to fling ourselves
from the rocky cliffs of Oregon into the churning Pacific center
ourselves and take a deep breath about this big thing we'd gotten
ourselves into, when Sal had that truly inspired idea to take the colors
of the gorgeous coast that we so loved and put them onto our house so that
we'd always have the beach with us -- seeing our beloved home dressed in
these colors we'd dreamt of for so long...I think we both felt something
click into place down deep inside, like the adoption papers had finally
gone through and the house was officially ours. The house that we
saw -- the one no one else could -- finally appeared.
Welcome to Hall House.
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