Weekend projects

This weekend we caught up on a few aethestic projects in the midst of all the construction. It's amazing the little things like this that make a big impact:

The front porch had a really unimpressive ceiling before. It was a wooden tile, but surrounded by empty space revealing raw (not "pretty" raw) wood, and covered with a metal screen so animals didn't take nest among other things I suppose...

We ripped out the screen, cleaned behind it, and decided to cover what was there with new wood, running horizontally in the style of the rest of the eaves. It will be painted the same gray as the house, and when the new (horizontal wood) front door is installed, I think it will tie in nicely!

BEFORE – dirty beige tiles – previously surrounded by screen

Dad beginning his work-in-progress

The area is framed and wood is nailed over the tiles that were there...

And built out around the edges. And we're ready for paint! We also installed a small can light for lighting.

Can't wait to get that door going now... And I finally found a builder here in the US willing to do it for a price that worked! (Details later...)

So Saturday, while my Dad was doing this, Mike was installing lights in the back of the house (and if anyone cares about the un-important jobs I was everyone's assistant/cleaner-upper ;)). We bought these lights from Lumens, my new favorite lighting site. They came in darker than anticipated but tie in well to our darker gray trim around the house.

Not a very impressive picture, but better in person! This happened over both backdoors.

After that, we did what we could to make the gable coming off the screen porch in the back, uh, look better. If anyone recalls back from Post 1, we had a gable on the front of the house as well that was torn off and replaced with a hip roof. I really wanted to do this in the back as well, however considering this screen porch will someday be replaced with another bedroom in Phase 2 or 3, we didn't feel it was worth undertaking the expense for something no one would likely notice but us.

BEFORE: Note the zigzag bottom and curvy side edging on top, w-a-y too cutesy for our taste

The bottom was leveled, and then sawed off

So were the side edges, and voila!

The best part is that the gable work was a super-simple fix, only about an hour. We'll paint it the same color as the house, probably put another one of those Nauticus lights from Lumens on that little mount hanging off the middle, and we're good for our Phase 1 fix.

Today is Monday and we hit the ground running with a big meeting before work today, where we made final decisions on the master bath measurements and pulled the trigger on finally ordering that tile among about a million other things.

Will try to sort through the interesting ones before sharing :) More this week!