The Gingerbread Transformation

So our gingerbread has been restored!  This has actually been done for a while now...but winter and life got in the way of me posting the 'after' photo.  A huge thank you to Mark Lucking Renovations for doing an amazing job with this incredibly detailed work (and at a way better price than any other quote we received :). 

Pretty great, eh?  In the end, the gingerbread (or vergeboard as I'm told it's actually called) was too rotted to be salvaged without major reinforcing so we opted to laminate new plywood on top of the original vergeboard.  Mark then painstakingly cut out the pattern, using the original wood as a template.  We couldn't be happier with the results!!

Through the painstaking process of removing 120 years worth of latex, oil, and lead paint from the wood Mark also discovered the original colours of the woodwork!  In true Victorian fashion, it was bright red and bright green!  Man oh man, those 19th century Canadians were brave in their colour choices...not like today's beige on beige on beige on taupe...

Porch Restoration Part 2: DONE!

The porch is finally done!  It's taken a few weeks for the finishing touches, but we finally made it.  Of our Porch Paint Possibilities, option #4 was the winner (but with a few tweaks).  We ended up painting the floor of the porch black rather than light gray.  Keeping it gray just made for too many contrasting elements.

We also ended up with a bit more yellow compared to any of our concept schemes.  We struggled with this.  We kept going back and forth on the whole black and yellow thing (all the while having this song stuck in our head).  Would it make the house look like the home of the city's biggest Hamilton Tiger-Cat fans?  Or like some sort of Victorian haunted house.  Hmmmm, what to do.  In the end we went for it....but not without toning down our Stuart Gold by mixing in some of the Sandy Hook Gray. 

I can't tell you how happy I am with how it all turned out - especially the front door!  It's hard to believe we left this incredible wood door concealed behind an ugly brown screen door for so long:

Porch Restoration Part 1: wash, strip, sand, fill, repeat

Finally...FINALLY, we got to work on restoring our porch this weekend.  Remember all those Porch Paint Possibilities?  Well, we chose one...sort of (more on that later) and with the perfect collision of gorgeous weather and a long weekend, we (nearly) finished returning our 120 year old Victorian porch to a more dignified state.

And remember when I said the work needed on the porch was mostly cosmetic?  Ha!  Not quite.  It took a full day and a half of washing, stripping, sanding, and wood filling before we even started painting.  I suppose that's not so bad in the grand scheme of things...but man, it was so tempting to just start slathering on shiny new paint.

After a light power washing, it was time to scrape.  Thankfully we bought a '14 in 1 Universal Tool for Painting and Projects'.

I'm not entirely sure of the other 13 things this tool does, but as far as scrapy things go, this tool was among the scrapiest.  After a good 6 hour scrape-down, it was time to bring out the big guns:

What?  Your drill doesn't come with a medieval torture device attachment?  Upon closer inspection, it turns out that this is actually an 'Original Easy Stripper'. (as seen on TV, so it must be good, right?)

I was hesitant to go at it with my easy stripper (as one should be), but somehow, the easy stripper doesn't damage wood, even 120 year old wood.  Just look at this before and after of one particularly nasty section of wood soffit:

Yeehaw I said.  Yeehaw indeed.  Now some of that paint just wasn't coming off.  I'm sure we could have gone out and bought some toxic paint eating chemical...but that's just not our thing.  Instead we accepted imperfection, and cleaned up the worst of the 'topography' with some 'Dap Drydex Spackling'.  It goes on pink and dries white!

Thankfully, this stuff dries fast.  So after some serious sanding (followed by some serious damp mopping), we were ready to paint!

Oh, and I almost forgot, check out our ugly mailbox and the amazingness we discovered behind it:

Needless to say, we decided not to put our mailbox back up, opting to stick with this original mail slot.

Now I know, if you've read this far, you must be patiently awaiting some sort of reveal of the finished product.  Well, as I mentioned, we're not quite done.  After 50 man hours (I mean person hours), we still have to put a second coat on the base of the porch, paint the actual porch floor, and touch up some of the details.  We'll get there soon.  In the meantime, to quench your curiosity, here's a sneak peak:

Front Garden Inspiration

Spring has been teasing us for weeks now...a warm day here and there followed by cold, wind, and even some snow!  So, our outdoor projects remain in the planing stages.  In addition to tackling a major paint job on the front of our house, we're hoping to do some landscaping in our front yard.

We came across this front yard in the May issue of House and Home magazine:

It's simple but effective.  Just 3 types of plants:  Purple flowering vinca, Calgary Carpet juniper, and Morning Light maidenhair ornamental grasses.  The front walk is Indiana limestone flagstone, and the frame around the maple grove is made from corten steel.  Here are some detail shots:

The steel frame adds a really great sculptural element.  The rusty orange colour works perfectly against all the green vegetation.  That said...those 4 maple trees are going to get pretty darn big.  We definitely don't want such large specimens overshadowing the front of our house.  Perhaps something smaller/ornamental could work too though.

Surely some real spring weather is just around the corner...we may not get to the whole front yard this year, but I am hoping to at least tackle the front walk.  Come on spring!!!

-kyle

Porch Paint Possibilities

Spring is here and we're itching to get working on the outside of our house again.  At the top of our list is painting our porch and gingerbread-filled gable.  The porch just needs some good sanding and re-painting.  The gable on the other hand looks like it has been neglected for far too long and will need a little more than just cosmetics...we'll be calling in a professional to help us keep this heritage feature in tact.

In the meantime, we are deciding on a colour scheme.  We want to be sure of our choice before buying up gallons of paint and spending hours painting, so we did 5 photoshop mock-ups.  We'd love your feedback to help us decide!

A couple things to keep in mind though....

• the roof currently has green asphalt shingles (visible here)....we don't plan to keep them forever, but they were put on by the previous owner just before we bought the house, so they'll likely stay for a number of years before we replace them with something more neutral
• the front of our house faces north, that means it is never in direct sunlight and is pretty shady
• we plan to ditch the brown storm door that's covering the beautiful wooden front door

So there ya have it!  5 schemes.  Which one is your favourite?  For reference, here is what the house looks like today:

ps - don't forget, you can follow Citify and all your favourite blogs on bloglovin'

-Kyle

Home Sweet Home

There she is, our city house.  This is how she looked the day we bought her.  It was truly love at first sight - sure, she's a little worn around the edges, needs a good coat of paint...but that porch, that bay window, that lack of a giant-imposing-in-your-face garage door...sigh...true love.  It was the first house we looked at.  In fact, we weren't even looking for a house at the time - in a way, the house found us.  The attraction was undeniable.  A magnetic force that resonated deep within our souls.  And now it's ours.

Though we've focussed mainly on interior stuff so far, we have made some exterior changes since this picture.  Hopefully by the end of summer she'll be ready for an 'after' shot.