God Bless the Indian Summer

Wow.

What a whirlwind of a last two weeks. A LOT has gotten done that we totally did not expect to get done. Why? One reason is that the Totally Crazy People Willing to Travel to Bloomington to Help Us With Our House list has grown to include another offender: Weston.

This guy just shows up to our house with a) a positive attitude, b) a week's worth of free time (which was originally only a weekend but was VOLUNTARILY extended to a week--double crazy), and c) carpentry and painting skillz and BAM! We got ourselves some major progress on our house.

Will's parents have also assumed the title of REPEAT OFFENDERs on my list.Will's dad spent a rainy, nasty day helping Will clean up our trashy yard and Peggy came up another day and painted the front of our house until after the sun went down (she used a light, don't worry).

Wanna see what we've been up to?

Weston and Will working on the siding on the front of the house

1st coat of paint on the front of the house.

front door w/ painted siding.

Oh--and I think I forgot to mention a while back that we successfully chose a trim color together. I've had mixed feelings about it since it's been up, but have decided that I officially really love it. It makes me think of our house as old (rather than modern-old, which I think it would have felt like if we had just gone with plain white, if that makes sense), and it reminds me of butter. Who doesn't like thinking about butter every time they walk into their house???

trim color: Benjamin Moore HC-6 Windham Cream

kitchen window

This is our new crawlspace door. Tim and Guff couldn't quite get a handle on how to make it at first, but they eventually figured it out.

The guys also cleaned up our junk-yard yard, taking 2500 lbs. to the dump in one day. Sorry, no pic. I figured words could speak for themselves on this one.

With winter right around the corner, we only have a few things left to do. BUT--even if we don't get to them, that's ok, because the house is technically winter-ready at this point.

Thanks friends and family for all your help this last week.

Parents Weekend

Will's parents came up for the day yesterday to help with the house. Could I ask for better in-laws??

To do list for the day: upstairs windows, painting, trim, and working on the shingles for the front porch roof.

Getting ready to install the windows.

2 in.

3's a charm.

With trim. Except for the two middle pieces. Those will be finished later. Also--trim installed around the windows and doors downstairs.

Thanks Marge Flowers for the lapless 2nd coat!

Father-son bonding.

Thanks guys for the help!

Paint ball

Paint.

No one ever told me that the hardest thing I'd ever encounter in married life would be choosing a paint color, together. Sickness or health, poverty or wealth...cake. Paint? A whole other ballgame as far as I'm concerned.

So our old siding was a creamy yellow-y color. First hitch in this whole one-flesh, one-color debacle was learning that Will had always "hated" what I considered to be the most attractive part of our somewhat dingy-looking exterior. Yellow-y creamy color=out.

So we tried a bunch of other yellows. And we hated them all. Paint hyperbole was everywhere:

Will: "I can't think of a single nice thing to say about either of those colors."

Colleen: "That reminds me of some putrid yellow vomit from 1970."

Yellow was going to break us. So, we said goodbye and moved on to green. Decided not to go green. Moved on and arrived at what had always secretly been my dream color...

(drum roll)

Blue!!!! (or, more specifically, Benjamin Moore HC [Historical Color]-136 Waterbury Green)

Dear Mom: Please don't be disappointed. I know you really wanted us to stick with yellow. So did we. But after taking a long, hard look at our priorities, we decided to keep the marriage and ditch the yellow. We're feeling blue, and we couldn't be happier about it. 

Our favorite thing about this color is that it reminds us of the cottage we stayed in on the beach in South Haven, MI (ok, so we stayed in the brown cabin behind the pretty blue cottage house, but that's a minor detail). It just makes us want to relax, slow down, and enjoy where we are. Which we'll get to after this whole house remodel thing.

In other remodeling news, Duke finally buried this thing (i.e. electrical line):

And now we have this nice, jump-out-of-the-top window-during-a-fire-worry-free-because-there-is-no-electrical-line-in-your-way wall:

Oh, and remember our roofless porch?

Now we have this:

We're pretty stoked with our new front porch roof (and the new front door and last replacement window on the left). It looks like this from underneath, and will eventually be covered with stained beaded board:

Ahh, progress. Thank the Lord.

Next up: Upstairs windows, lots of painting (and choosing a trim color, God help us!), more siding, and gutters.