Porch Work + Door Set

A few weeks ago (right at the end of summer camps and the first weekend post-running summer camps for two of us), the black-eyed susan vines were cut down off the porch. I'd been waiting for that weekend to cut them down and Trevor had the same idea since I came home on that Thursday to half of it gone and the next day it was all gone.

We cleaned off the porch and visited Home Depot to get some trim supplies. When we removed the floor-to-ceiling windows in the beginning of the year, we were so busy with things that we hadn't installed new trim at the base of the porch to replace where the old window trim met the porch floor. We installed that and scraped the window there and primed it.

I have some photots, but it doesn't look like much (over than the vines being gone. Michelle completely forgot what the porch looked like without the vines and hadn't realized how much space we were missing because of the vines.

Hopefully, we can get some time in the next couple of weeks to scrap, sand and prime some more of the house.

We also decided to change the red we were thinking for the exterior window trim. Something darker and more red than the one we were originally thinking.

Also, I picked up a Kwikset front door set from the Home Depot clearance section a couple months back for about $40 (I think?) instead of $160. Definitely looks better with a matching set on the door!

Updated Design

Design for the front yard and porch with the colors we chose to paint the house (the green here is darken than what we chose, but I'm lazy). The back of the house currently has these colors, but we were waiting to do the rest until after the new windows were put in.

Other than that, this is updated to show the new windows we put in (yay!) and I drew up a better door (so that it matches our actual door). And again, the porch columns and railing are an idea of what to replace the really crappy iron railing and columns with. Still deciding on column style, a basic square post or a boxed and bricked post, or boxed and bricked with a taped post top...

One of these days, I need to draw up a map of the garden idea and post it. It'll be easier to ID all the plants and locations with a top map. There's a lot of native plants and drought-tolerate plants along with fruit trees/vines (kiwi, avocado, orange, lemon, lime and California grapes). Although, we semi-recently added blueberries to the growing mix so the grapes might be replaced with those.

Color Idea?

We went to Home Depot yesterday and chose some colors to play with and try out. But, we ended up with pretty much the same color scheme that we used on our last purchased home (a stucco Victorian/Craftman Bungalow).


Pretty similar to the colors we chose.

House Idea. Mind you, the house has wood siding and I didn't put that detail back in.

I added in a railing on the left side of the porch since we're thinking of putting in a stairway on that side.
Also of note is the door. We currently have a blank wood door and we want to find one that has window panes on the top half.
We're thinking of tapered columns and got a quote from a company for an idea of what it will be cost wise.


Window idea detail.

And now back to coming up with more logical ideas. Those colors totally work on our old house, but definitely not on this one. In the mean while, we've got these colors painted on random windows in the backyard in different combos. Need to sand that off, haha.

Studio, New Projects

It's been a couple of months since I've done any updates on the bathroom. There's a good reason for it: we haven't worked on the bathroom in that time. Life got busy and what's left now is finishing small things around the room. We have worked on a couple of other projects around the house, as you can see below.

We've evicted a renter in the studio, had to remove ALL of his junk as he abandoned it and it's finally back to clean and in shape to have someone rent it for a couple of months. It was NOT livable at all. He had piles everywhere. It was digusting. It took about three weeks to clean it out. Two loads to the dump. A garage sale. And we still have so much of his junk left that we ordered a free dumpster from the city. Not only that, but we're owed thousands of dollars in rent that we're never going to get.



My boyfriend and I will be renting the studio near the end of summer, when he graduates from UC Irvine. Until then, it looks like we might have a renter from the East Coast who needs a place to stay for a few months until his fiancé can move out here, too. We now have a buddy living back there, awesome! We kept some of the furniture that the evictee left, so it's partially furnished for the guy. Although, we're trying to find him a real bed (free, craigslist, of course).



New projects around the house!


We got bored and decided the bathroom in the studio had a really stupid ledge that needed to have colorful tile on it. We had a lot of mosaic tile sitting around waiting for a project. We just need to paint the walls in the bathroom now.



The hot tub area now has a wood-topped roof and is waiting to be painted once the weather is dry.



We're sanding the house so that we can start figuring out colors and start painting. So far, we know that we want green walls and a blue door. We just need to decide on which ones and then figure out what we want to do for the trims and frames.



We're thinking of adding columns to the front porch, as all we have right now is this lame iron decorative railing system that we hate. In the mock ups I did in Photoshop, the house looks AMAZING with columns. All of the other houses in the neighborhood have columns and we're thinking that at some point there might have been earthquake damage (or an insane person) and the columns were taken out and replaced with the iron railing and iron columns.