Our floor plan idea

We love our little house- but it is so darn little. We have a breakfast nook that we don't use at all and a laundry room off the kitchen that doesn't make any sense. The new floor plan will turn the breakfast nook into a small bedroom. Our old bedroom will become open to the common areas as a tv room. The akward hallway with 5 doors will be opened up. We plan on installing 6 craftsman columns where the old walls were. The laundry room will be gone and the kitchen extending to the Bush Street side of the house. We are planning to completely demo the termite infested garage and rebuilding it attached to the house. Hopefully with a small apartment on top. Pretty ambitious huh?

FINALLY the ugly starts coming off

We have been doing many many projects that are very necessary, but not visable to our neighbors walking by. No one can see that we have fabulous hydronic radiant floor heating system or our $8,000 on demand boiler in our attic. The new roof we put on the house looks great, but it's kinda like new tires on your car... everyone needs tires. Noah is my hero. He has painfully stripped all of the paint off our house leaving beautiful (and original!!!) wood siding. It took 3 different paint sprayers and 10 different types of chemic stripper to find the right combination. Some strippers has too much wax and clogged the sprayer. Other strippers were just not strong enough and took several applications. Sanding, filling and more sanding, we finally had smooth beautiful wood. You can see in the picture that we also removed all of the window trim. That will be replaced too.

Here is an example of our color inspiration. A lovely hotel on the Sonoma Square. We plan on using white trim, but making the windows a charcoal color..



We used an acrylic primer tinted to a similar color that the paint will be. We are still in the process of filling all of the little imperfections. We have also started putting on the window and door trim. We will be putting a nice sized apron under the sill and adding a lintil and bead at the top. First we just need to get this house painted!






























Finally, we are making the house less drafty by caulking around the trim on all the windows and doors. Noah is using about 1 tube per window. It looks great and will keep our wonderful heat in and the cold OUT.Lets hope we get some REAL painting done!