What's Under That? Siding Edition

I'll be the first to admit that the exterior of the house looks... weathered. Or, as our niece said, like a haunted house.

It's a bit gray. Gray is the new black, right?

We knew the siding would have to go. For one, it's gone unpainted for so long that I'm pretty sure it wouldn't really accept a coat of paint. For two, we already had a pretty good idea of what was under it... wasps. Lots and lots of wasps, building their nests in between the top layer of siding and the layer underneath it.

So, on the first nice day of spring, the Great Waspicide of 2017 began. The good part was that they were very, very sleepy wasps. Basically, I'd pull off a piece of siding -- with my hands, because it's really at the falls-apart-if-you-tug-on-it stage -- and then use the pry bar -- and, ok, often just my gloved fingers -- to squish all the wasps. They just sat there and took it.

The lean-to has been the easiest part. Under the hard board siding is a layer of real wood siding, which has now been entirely uncovered and de-wasped, and which after some scraping and cleaning, should be ready to get painted something less pink.

Calling it "cotton candy" instead of "Pepto Bismal" doesn't really improve things.

The main house is harder. Mostly, that's because a whole lot more of it is way above our heads, which so far has meant one person on a ladder removing siding, and the other person on the ground, holding the ladder. This makes for pretty slow going, as it involves a lot of going up and down and moving the ladder around. It's also slow because apparently the one weather feature we can count on up there is wind, which doesn't really inspire one to get up on a ladder to tug at siding.

At this point, we've pretty well decided that there's some bucket lift rental in our near future. But even with just two of us and a ladder, we've achieved almost one side of the house. Ok, it's the smallest side, but still.

This is far less pink than expected.

This new layer of siding is made of asphalt, so it's basically like roof shingles, but as siding. We've been patching up holes as we go, but we're still not sure what we'll do as a final step. We'll probably at least see if this can be primed and painted. From what I've seen, I'm not super hopefully, but I've been wrong before. In the meantime, there's still siding to remove and wasps to murder.

And The Walls Came Tumbling Down

Remember that amazing stone porch? While the main portion is pulled away from the house a little big, the railings up the steps were leaning... well, kind of a lot.

It doesn't take an engineer to know that this is not right.

We had hoped that maybe we'd be able to winch them together to straighten them out. It did not go as planned.

This is also not right.

After 100 years or so, the mortar just wasn't having any of that, and as soon as the railing started moving, the one on the right also started crumbling. Fortunately, we already had a backup plan in place, which was to remove the railings entirely, use those stones to create pillars at the bottom of the stairs, and then adding metal or wooden railings in between.

That's a great plan, but it still means we have to break up and haul away all that stone. Turns out, that's way more time consuming than scraping off some plaster. The good news (I think) is that by the next weekend, this had happened all on its own.

Goodbye, railings. You were nice while you lasted.

So now we still have to sledge up the stones and move them, but we don't also have to knock over the railings (admittedly, that was going to be the easy part of the job). Honestly, I think I like the look of the porch better this way -- it's a bit cleaner looking, I think.

We're still not quite sure what we're going to do about the rest of the porch situation, but we have a lot to keep us occupied while we figure it out... like moving rocks. So. Many. Rocks

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What's Under That? Dining Room Walls Edition

Just because I haven't been posting, it doesn't mean that no work has been getting done. In fact, it's finally warming up a bit here in Michigan, so we can open up the windows and finally get the farmhouse cleaned up!

One project that's been ongoing for quite awhile has been the back wall of the dining room. When we bought the house, that wall had some faux brick right behind the wood burner, with wood paneling on either side. The wood paneling could have been worse, but still.

The paneling in question is over on the left, popping up behind the wood burner.

It was, apparently, so nondescript that we didn't even get a good "before" picture. Alas. But then one day, Chris asked The Question... "should we see what's under that?"

Good question. The answer? Kind of a hot mess, actually.

Here's what you're seeing. The brown dots are leftover adhesive that was doing a no-longer-especially-good job of holding on the paneling. The yellow is a skim coat of plaster that had been put on over two layers of wallpaper (the main layer is the kind of blue-gray color) because apparently plastering over wallpaper is a thing?

Also, while we're talking about the dining room, let's take a moment to remember the weird partial wall between the dining room and the kitchen. That bit in the middle by the step-stool is a closet, and above it is the chimney that's getting removed eventually.

Even more paneling. How lovely.

There were two main jobs here: popping the paneling off the divider walls, and scraping the plaster off the wallpaper (and, as a related job, removing whatever wallpaper got left behind). One of these was significantly easier than the other.

Almost one big room!

If you guessed the paneling was the easy one, you're absolutely right. The plaster scraping was tedious. One the right side of the wood burner, at least some of it came down fairly easily; on the left, that stuff did not want to go.

In the end, we finally got it scraped away, and these warmer days have made it possible to goo up the walls with some wallpaper remover to strip off the final remaining layers of paper and paste, so we're finally just left with the plaster.

Ta-da!

You can see what we think might be the shadow of an old picture rail there at the top, and hopefully when we get things all squared away with the walls, there will be one again. Due to the paneling, the baseboard is missing on this wall, so that will need to be replaced, too. But for now, we have at least one clean slate to work with!

And, because I really did like it, one final salute to the original wallpaper from that wall.