shutters up.

Do you ever obsess over what should be the simplest things? I had such a hard time trying to choose the shutter dogs for our shutters. I didn't even realize there was a choice in such things (or that they were even called shutter dogs) until I started to look for them. I did so much online research and drive by photo snapping that I ended up with a folder full of photos - of shutter dogs!

Taken in Princeton, NJ over the summer; propeller:

Rat tails:

"S" variety:

"S" variety mounted on the side:

Taken in Historic Richmondtown, Staten Island, NY:

Scroll variety:

Crude yet minimal replacement on the same building:

For our own shutters, we've chosen the "S" variety. This is really more a choice of economy rather than an actual decision. We happened across two new old stock sets of "S" shutter dogs at a yard sale a few weeks back. They were $1 a box! It looks like we even saved 60 cents on the original price.

As of last week, the shutters are finally up on the house.

Before:

We now also have 7 different colors of paint on the house. This is the first time I've seen the grey we chose against the house. I love it. I'm not a "paint a patch and see what it looks like" kind of person - I chose this from a tiny swatch and bought it all at once. Relief.

We still need to find shutters for the upper floors. The other shutters we inherited had too much rot to salvage. Now, I can start obsessing over shutters.

amazing bug...

planning its attack on Curtis High School...

watch the hairpiece!

A few weeks back, over a long weekend, my Dad and Fernando finally pulled apart and rebuilt our front porch steps.

The decking was rotted in a few areas:

So new boards were added:

Finished steps:

They are still in their primed state since the weather has been too hot for painting. They (and the deck) will eventually be painted Sherwin-Williams, "Summit Gray."

They don't creak one bit.

We've also had our eaves painted!

It was a scary process... I'm glad we didn't have to get involved.

This area needed patching:

Before:

And after (a toupee in Sherwin-Williams, "Black Magic"):

Next up in exterior painting: the bay window. If this heat wave ever ends...

Year #2!

Fernando found and sent me this photo last month:

The photograph, entitled "Invisible House in Staten Island," is by filmmaker Lynn Sachs and can be found on her website here.
Yes, that is our house.
Happy 2nd Re-Birthday House! I'm glad you no longer look like a giant bush with roof.

shutters for the day!

We luckily inherited most of our original storm windows for the house when we bought it. They were stacked in the basement:

And some of the original shutters too!

There are signs that they were once mounted outside:

If you look closely, you can see the dirty outline where they once were:

We had our local handyman take the best shutters to prime for us - we had 4 still in good condition. He brought them over today and gave them a preliminary hanging before Fernando paints them.

We purchased some of the hardware we were missing many months ago - it's a perfect fit. We'll be painting the hardware black and we will need to order more. We bought everything that was available in stock at the time from Reiman's Hardware.

I'll have to hunt around for the outer hardware too.

Temporarily in place! Now I'm thinking I might need wider window boxes...

I really can't wait to start working on the exterior trim paint. It will be nice to not have to look at that peeling yellow paint when I come home from work... too bad, we're still quite a ways off from that reality.

Do these things happen to you too?

Sometimes things just don't go our way. We'll start a project and realize we've forgotten something and then spend two hours running back and forth to Home Depot. Or the weather doesn't cooperate. Or we have to work most of weekend and we end up too exhausted for anything else.

We planned to re-build our front steps over Memorial Day weekend. We ripped out the hideous metal pipe railing:

We were excited to find stepping in the extra long length (12 feet!) we needed over at Garber's. We bought it ahead of time and ordered the wood for the risers. Did you know that wood doesn't standardly come in whole inches? They call them 2X4's but they're more like 1.5X 3.5's!
We had to have the riser wood ripped down and slightly trimmed to length. The guy that was supposed to be working in the mill decided to take off for the long weekend early (right after we placed our order) and they called us the next day and said our wood wouldn't be ready until the following Tuesday. Bye bye re-building front steps over Memorial Day weekend plan.
I really want this project to be over - our front steps really suck.
Lots of wear and tear:

General Scuzziness reporting to duty:

Chunks missing:

The new steps were longer than our car:


Can you take a photo with one hand while carrying steps with the other?

Fresh primer:

Long risers:

Now we're all primed and ready to go but we're waiting on my Dad to have a free weekend to help out.

On a positive note, the decaying front porch isn't stopping our new jackmanii clematis: