Morphing

c. 2012

Awhile back I posted a picture of our landscaping job after our kitchen remodel and someone requested a picture of how our house looked before all of that started. I'm not very good about taking pictures before I start a project, especially one that is a long term project like the exterior of our house has been. But in this case I was lucky because before we actually bought the house, I walked around it taking pictures so we could mull it over. It was pretty hideous but after sleeping on it a few nights, we thought that it had potential and we made an offer that was accepted by the owners, who happened to be our realtor, who was living there at the time. Above is one of those pictures taken almost exactly nine years ago.

c. 2014

This picture is an intermediate picture. The old landscaping was torn out and replaced. It was all mature and starting to show its age plus smelled of urine from a lot of dogs using it as their urinal. The sidewalk had harbored a colony of moles, had sunk and was uneven. With aged grandparents who frequently stopped by to visit, it was a tripping hazard and so it was replaced along with the driveway and garage floor, also in equal disrepair. Another project had been to reside the house. The old Masonite siding had been neglected over the years and was water damaged and falling apart in many places. The fake columns on the sides of the windows were also rotted and falling off. The house was very drafty. So all that was torn off, I wrapped the house and resided it with cement siding. The picture shows all of this after it had happened. I hadn't yet painted the siding (it came pre-primed) nor had I built the trellises yet.

10 Jun 2021

Above is the most current photo. The kitchen addition has been added on along with the front porch. The roof eyebrows are gone (they were half rotted and a potential leak hazard) and the roof has been replaced along with new gutters added. The landscaping is in place and my grass seeding job is starting to look better. You can see that I have painted the siding and the mentioned trellises built and installed. The center landscape bed with the large pot in it will eventually have bulbed flowers of some sort planted in it but my wife didn't get them planted in time for this year. On my to-do list yet it to build a porch swing and perhaps some porch furniture and maybe a fence in between the porch columns. We are still undecided at this point. Our initial plans had one and it would kind of give us a bit of privacy but with the landscaping installed, there isn't the dramatic step off the porch anymore. It is just a regular sized step down to the gravel which I kind of like versus having to walk around if a fence were there. 

10 June 2021

Here is one more picture of the front from the road out front. It shows a bit more of our front lawn and two of the five trees planted to shield the front of our house from the road that leads off down the hill and into the neighboring valley. These two trees are apple trees which produced a lot of apples last year and taken by the squirrels. They are fenced in to prevent the deer from eating them until they get a bit bigger. Not pictures and to the right of this photo is a sour cherry tree, a serviceberry tree and some sort of plum/apricot hybrid tree that my wife got somewhere. These trees, when mature, will provide a bit of a privacy screen and also why we are still on the fence about putting a railing on our porch.