How Can Such a Little House Have Such Big Demands?

July 6, 2016July 5, 2016 / Apple Hill Cottage / 11 Comments

We’ve been doing lots of little things on the house of late, but none of them has been post-worthy on its own.

Earlier this spring, Mr. H.C. put bricks under the front windows to finish them.

Front windows Before

Front windows After

We also cleaned the brick, took out the old yews, and put in some new landscaping.

All landscaping plants are deer-resistant. Unfortunately, the sunflowers I planted weren’t rabbit proof…

We updated our outdoor seating — Mr. H.C. put new wood on the seats of these old chairs, and I painted them.

I painted away the last of the blue gray cedar shakes, and Mr. H.C. built an arbor for our grapes inside the garden gate to protect them from the local plant predators.

There’s a new planter for herbs and cherry tomatoes on the sunny side of the back porch; it looks like it has always been there.

We took down the hideous-looking gutter from the front porch and added a nice new face board.

Once that was done, we agreed that the ugly painted plywood ceiling above the porch just wouldn’t do (it was so ugly, I never even took a photo of it…)

…so we gutted the ceiling and replaced it with traditional porch beadboard. It was a great day when that plywood ceiling came down.

But the really exciting news is that last week two trucks from Home Depot delivered a new door, a new window, and roofing materials and shingles. Mr. H.C. was anxious to get started on the roof, so I was surprised one evening when he came in and said, “I really think we should put the door in first. I don’t want it sitting around getting scratched up.”

Replace Sliding Glass Door # 3? I danced with glee. (There were originally FIVE sets of sliding glass doors in the cottage when we acquired it. ~~Two are gone~~. Three are now gone! This was Mr. H.C’s project all the way. All I did was pick the doors, the color, help move them across the yard, and shout encouragement from the sidelines.

The project would have gone faster, but like all old cottage projects, one must expect the unexpected. Or, at least, not be surprised. The sill under the sliding glass doors looked like this when we took it out:

So extra work was involved rebuilding the sill, adding concrete and raising the new doors a bit to make a lovely (and solid) new concrete sill. These doors enter into what is lovingly called the garage bedroom. It used to be the garage. When the inside is finished, it will be the office, a guest bedroom, and the tv room — it’s a small room to be a threefer…

The plastic was on for FIVE days….

Fiberglass doors by Milliken Millwork, painted Sherwin Williams Dovetail Gray.

And one more before-and-after shot:

The original cottage in the fifties

The remodeled cottage of the seventies

July, 2016, with still plenty of projects to complete

Excuse the green-tarped package in the center of the yard. That’s the next old-cottage project.

On to the roof…

roofing in the dark to beat tomorrow's rain

Yup, we work 24/7 around here…

143. All the Gray Is Gone…

August 27, 2015August 27, 2015 / Apple Hill Cottage / 10 Comments

Just when I think I’m going to post about the new back porch that is finished just in time for September (it’s not);

Or the new door that we’ve found to replace sliding glass door #3 (we haven’t);

Mr. H.C. surprises me by saying, “Let’s do the front of the house.”

He must have read my post a month or so ago, when I listed all the projects that need to occur for the front of the house to look ~~good~~ better. (See post 136.)

This is the cottage up until two days ago. (Uhmmm — the way it’s looked for the last two years. Just let me say that the front looks WAY better than the back.) So with the red brick, the faded blue gray cedar shakes, and the white clapboard siding, there was just way too much going on. Sort of a stripey effect, don’t you think?

I’m actually favoring the colors of white, red, and gray; but in a google image search for “white cottage red trim” this is the first image that showed up:

old_kurtz_house
Please pardon me, if this is your house, but it’s not at all what I have in mind for the cottage. Though it does look about like the color of red that is our back porch — Segovia Red — this color right here:

Back porch rails and ceiling, newly painted

The back porch color can be seen from both sides of the house as one drives down (or up) the road. So it counts.

I always thought when we did the exterior of the cottage, that we would try to emulate what it looked like in the forties; but we can’t really.

Back then it was white with forties green trim.

The roof was green, now it’s gray, and it will stay that color when we put on the new roof (next year?).

There was not a red back porch.

And there was no brick on the front. I’ve looked at photos of white houses with dark green and red trim, and no, I don’t want a Christmas house.

Here’s what we have now:

Neither of us are used to seeing it without the gray. Mr. H.C. thinks it might be too much white. I was originally thinking of whitewashing the brick, but now I’m thinking yes, that might be too much white…

The sliding glass doors will be replaced sometime before winter with doors that look something like this:

There hasn’t been an interactive post on this blog for awhile, so here is your chance:

Should we paint the brick? If so, what color of gray? :-) (Maybe if we paint the doors red, it will tie in the brick color?
What about door colors? Both front doors can be painted. (Keep in mind that the back porch is Segovia Red, and one can see the porch from both sides of the house.)
What do you think about shutters? Mr. H.C. brought that up the other day, just as I had been thinking about them too. But I have an aversion to shutters that don’t fit the windows, and that’s a 3-window series there in the front… I’m thinking more along the lines of flower boxes under those 3 front windows. What do you think — flower boxes or shutters or neither?

I’d like to hear your thoughts, dear readers. Of course, then we’ll do what we want anyway — whatever that might be…

Here are some more shots to get you thinking…

The remodeled cottage of the seventies

The siding has only one coat of paint still — hence the yellow tape.

Does there need to be a piece of trim between the siding and the shakes?

136. The Mail Came Bringing Me Old Photos…

June 16, 2015January 20, 2016 / Apple Hill Cottage / 15 Comments

Not much exciting comes in the mail these days.

Yet hope springs eternal, and I always walk out to the mailbox with an anticipation that is rarely fulfilled.

Until yesterday — the mail came bringing me an unassuming envelope with a hand-written return address from Texas. I knew immediately what it was and who it was from: my second cousin, Buzz, who visited last October had promised me some old photos of the cottage, taken when he was a boy visiting the farm.

Precious old sepia photographs spilled from the envelope. Carefully numbered, he had labeled each one with names and sometimes a date. The cottage is older than we thought.

I wish I could tell what kind of flowers and shrubbery that is. When we first started work on this side of the house, I pulled out a sad looking, old-fashioned thorny white shrub — bridal veil I think it’s called. The pump is long gone, but the well is still there. Mr. H.C. is forever mad at his mom for selling that pump…

Buzz is hanging on to the pump handle, and that’s his older brother Jack next to him. This is circa 1936 or 37, and those are the kitchen windows we lovingly restored. The landscaping around the house makes me think that the cottage is at least a few years old when these photos were taken. That puts it considerably older than the early forties, which we had estimated.

Here’s a shot of what the windows looked like after Mr. H.C. put up the storm windows. You can tell the window on the right was not quite finished. I guess I should take another photo…

I love the simple trim around these windows. If you look carefully at the old photos, you’ll notice all the windows were trimmed like this.

This is the front door of the cottage where the living room windows are now. There’s no way to bring back that charming little entrance with the lattice and the vines — at least in that spot. But I’m thinking on it…
buzz mariam mom

I especially love this photo because that’s my mom on the right with her cousins, Buzz and his older sister Mariam. I knew right away it was my mom, because, I have a photo of myself at that age, and oh my goodness, we could be twins. Mr. H.C. took one look at the photo and said, “That looks like you!” My Mother, My Self…
buzz Jack Mom
In this photo, if you look very hard, you can see the awning that is decorating the kitchen entrance. That’s Buzz, and his brother Jack in the wagon, and the little giant girl next to them is Mom. Mariam is in the background, and you can also tell that there aren’t many trees in the side or back yard yet, and the huge sycamore in the front yard is not yet planted.

Old folks at the cottage

That’s the old folks sitting out in the front yard by the road. The fence was gone by the time I was a girl and playing in the front yard. My grandma Carrie is on the left, then her mother Laura, sister Edna and her husband Jim (who I always heard was in the circus) and sister Ethel and her son Buzz are on the right. He dates this photo ’36 or ’37 also. It’s hard to tell where in the front yard this is, but again, there aren’t many trees…

So one of my secondary categories on this blog is 40s houses. I guess I’m going to have to change it to 30s houses.

Here is a painting that Joe and Clara had done of the house when they bought it in 1974, before they started renovating. Painting of Apple Hill Cottage, ca.1973

And here’s what it looks like today — still under construction. We haven’t really gotten to the outside of the house yet. But we hope to have the gray cedar shakes all painted white by the end of the summer, as well as replicating the trim around the front windows.