Mocking up the Handrails

Most of Saturday was spent sanding and painting the beam. I'm not sure it looks like we did a lot, but it sure seemed to take a while.



We still need to fake some relief on the dark green brackets at the top of the posts, like I did on the bay window, but the paint needs to dry a little more before I do that...

There was some big community event geared at kids that took place on the common on Saturday. When these type of things happen, because we are right in downtown, our street becomes a parking lot, and we have a lot of extra traffic passing by. We had a lot of people saying they liked the color scheme (now that it looks like a color scheme and not just a pink house). Jim and I joked that we'll be starting a trend... only everyone else will have their houses done before we can even finish our porch...

Speaking of finishing,

I had visions of going all agro-renovator and getting the handrails put up this weekend too. THAT didn't quite happen, but we did get some parts cut out for two of the sections.

Here's Jim checking out how the subrail works. It took a couple tries to get a tight fit with the subrail between the posts. Not having any carpentry training, we kind of learn as we go - I'm sure there's plenty of tricks of the trade that we don't know...



And then I HAD to pull out the camera to take a shot of a baluster in place:



one day all 50+ of those things are going to see the light of day... one day... hopefully soon.

Then my little side project - the house number! I've been scouring the internet trying to find a cool house number to go on the porch. One fitting of the new improvements. I found a few sites that made cool metal ones in almost any font you can imagine. Those numbers were around 80 bucks. While maybe not a ton of money, I wasn't sure I wanted to spend that much for something that may or may not match the gold paint, and with some roof repairs/replacement pending (more on that another day), I didn't really want to spend the extra dollars anyway. So last night a lightbulb went off, and I decided to make one with the scroll saw and paint it with the same gold paint.

Here it is:


I do have to admit that the number broke in two at that thin spot on top. We had to glue it back together. Maybe it won't last through a New England winter - we'll find out - but, hey, the cost was essentially free, and that can't be beat.

And the Winner is...

OK, so maybe I influenced the poll with my exclamation point! next to my favorite, or maybe the majority of you just feel the same way I do... But still, even with a paint program, you're never really sure if it will look the same in real life.

Last weekend with Jim home we were able to do a bunch of post painting. Other than the tedious first day of sanding, none of the work was particularly difficult, so it all went pretty easy. Which almost makes me wonder if we worked hard enough? Particularly since it was my last weekend before fall semester started! Oh well.

Jim, by the way, has a much higher standard of finish work than I do. Which is probably a good thing. It comes from all the body work he has done on cars, I think. I don't really have the patience or technique, so he ended up doing most of the detail himself. They ended up looking pretty good.

And then we primed them:


To make all the painting easier, we drilled screws part-way into both ends of the posts and then set them onto notches cut into the sawhorses. That way we could twirl them around fairly freely.

Then to dry the posts, we put more notches into some 2xwhatevers and left them in the garage overnight:


Then on Sunday and Monday we worked on the painting in this garage set-up. It probably would have been more comfortable had it been higher up, but oh well, what's a little back pain?




I thought this was going to be a masking tape nightmare of a project (that's one way to support Mother 3M), but actually, the more that I worked on it, the easier it got, and I really only needed it for the gold section where it went from square post to turned post. Most of the pinstriping was done without tape - a benefit of the turnable setup.

I really like how the gold turned out:


And overall, I think the posts look great!


This is where we ended on Monday afternoon. We cleaned up and called some friends over for a little Labor Day BBQ.

To finish these off, I need to get some semi-gloss pink paint. The flat paint looks a little odd with all the others all glossy.

Then it's make the base plates, picture-frame the porch floor with an edge piece, and install the posts, etc etc etc. A lot to do still, but it's starting to feel good to see it all coming back together.

Paint My Posts

OK, so I'm getting more and more dangerous with the computer painting (though still not any better). I've got to pick out a color scheme for the posts, as hopefully in the next few weekends, if all goes well, I should be able to start painting.

Starting with a shopped-up photo from before (no, I haven't finished painting the front or putting up the shingles yet... and by the way, the balusters are only computer added as well - hey, it makes it seem a little more like the final product!) Here are my proposals for the post colors... starting with the most basic

All Cream:


Green & Gold:


Green & Pink:


Green, Pink, & Gold!


And just to see it all...


What do you think? If I've done this right, there should be a poll on the right hand side...

Filling & Faking

My day unexpectedly freed up today, so I put the filler on the porch posts.



This filler epoxy was smelly. But it definitely had a longer pot life than the bondo type filler. This goes into the list of "tedious" jobs. I'm not sure I have the skilled hand to recreate some of the lost profile - at least not well. But I have a feeling it's one of those things that people won't even notice unless they're investigating close up.

And what would my weekend be without at least one tangential project?
The other thing I played with today after I finished filling, was the brackets on the bay window. If you've been reading this, you may recall my earlier post obsessing over the colors around the window. Well, the brackets have continued to bug me, so I finally got some new light green paint and did a test. Here's what it looks like close up:



My attempt was to fake some relief and to make it so that the brackets didn't just look like bland and awkward additions. I think it worked pretty well. It got too dark, so I wasn't able to finish all of them tonight... just gives me something else to work on tomorrow.

Obsessing over Color and Shingles

Besides the bay window, I've been thinking a LOT about what to do under the peaks. A couple summers ago I played around with shaped shingles on the garage face:


I made these shingles out of plain cedar random shingles from Homer using the tablesaw to standardize the width, and the mitersaw to chop the corners. It was a relatively inexpensive solution, compared with what I've found on-line, and it produced the effect I wanted.

I'd like to do something similar under the front and side peaks:



And here is another picture from a "Painted Ladies" book (Pomona & Larson) that shows some ideas for designs to put into the shingles with color:



Of course, that is far too busy for my taste, but if you look closely at it, there are several different simpler individual patterns that could be used:



I kind of like these:



But I also like the diamond pattern in between these two - I used something like that on the garage. Jim thinks they look like cherries, so maybe that's why I like it...

One of the things I've been wondering with this shingle idea is if the scale would be right on the front of the house. The peak is broken up with the top of the bay window and also with the arched window.



Just looking at the house makes it really hard to tell. Maybe because of the crappy condition of the old siding. So tonight I amused myself by working in a photo editor. I copied the garage roof shingles onto the above picture. Let me preface this by saying that I am NOT an expert at photo editing, so don't look at the details, just look at it for an overall perspective. This is what I came up with:



What do you think-
-will it work to do the entire peak in the shingles?

How about this one:



I kind of like that a little better. I think it matches the garage better this way, and it just looks better - maybe because it helps define the peak shape even though it's broken up by the bay window.

What do you think????

Obsessing over Color

As the days start getting warmer, I'm starting to think again about exterior color. I've been looking at my color scheme - particularly in the front of the house and thinking that I don't quite have it right yet. I feel like the dark green brackets above the bay window are too stark of a contrast against the white (which is actually a cream, but still looks very white...) So I pulled out my "Painted Ladies" books (Pomada & Larsen) and looked back at some of my favorite pictures, trying to figure out what I liked about them and pinpoint what I feel is missing in mine.



Now, it's a little hard to directly compare my house to, say, San Francisco ornate Victorians, because the style IS really quite different. Houses in this New England neighborhood tend to be much more basic. (I guess that's why they call it a "folk Victorian") But I think I can still do more with color on what I have.

Here are the bay window details on some of my favorites in the books:








What do you think? Can you see what I'm missing? I have a few ideas...
On the brackets, I want to fake some relief by adding a stripe down the middle in a lighter green, like this:

Then on the 1st floor windowsill, I want to paint a medium green. I can then add the missing crown/bed molding under the sill in the dark green.

Then on the side of each window, I can add some light green details. Something basic, or maybe with a center gold highlight.

And above the windows, I could also add another light green detail, with some gold rosettes or such...


And of course, as Jim points out, I really do hate those asphalt shingles in between the two floors. I've already sneaked a peak underneath those, and they were originally wood shingles. I'd like to reshingle it with painted octagon shingles.

Will all of this make it too ridiculous or too fussy? Hard to tell. But I definitely need some medium and/or light green around those brackets. Now, what will be a good medium and light green? Here's the color chips I've been using for the house:

It may be too small to read, but I've marked the 2 reds I've used - the bottom one is the main color - and I've also marked the green on the brackets. The light green I've marked I tried sampling on the back of the house, but it comes out too light, I think:


So maybe the two above the bracket color become medium and light. I'll have to pick up samples to test it out.

I have some more color obsessions, but I'll save those ramblings for tomorrow...