I think it was originally white…with forest green trim.
But the house next door is white, with blue trim.
They must have thought
That just won’t do …
So let’s go ahead and paint it blue!

All the windows on the second story are vertical casement windows that open inward. Most of them were without screens.  Having new ones custom made would be cost prohibitive, so I decided to make some more myself.

The biggest challenge was figuring out how to do a half-lap joint on the corners of the frame. (I found a number of videos on the Internet.) Actually the original screens have a slightly different joint, but it was too difficult for me to reproduce so I found that I could do a half-lap and it would be sufficient and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference just looking at the screen from the outside of the house.

The challenge was using the table saw to slowly, pass by pass, trim the wood away half way through the board, as you can see in the photo above.

When all the joints were created, the boards were glued and nailed together (with my nifty little cordless nail gun!) and allowed to dry.

Then they had to be sanded, primed and painted. After that, the screen material was cut to size and stapled to the outside surface of the frame. A thin wood molding, called screen molding (of all things!) was cut to size and applied (after it had been primed, painted, and was dry) over the edge of the screen, close to the inner opening of the frame, covering the staples. Any excess screen was trimmed off with a utility knife. I chose to miter the corners of the screen molding which makes them look neater and more professional. The original screens don’t have mitered corners on the molding.

The screens were custom made to fit each particular window. They are held in place with “gate” hooks, one at the top and one at the bottom. Another challenge was figuring out where to place the hooks to get the screen to fit snugly into its opening.

Here’s the concrete crew at work:

Finally done.

Here’s the “new” vintage patio table I found on Craigslist for $40. Cute, isn’t it? Unfortunately, it only has one chair that goes with it. I gave them a new coat of paint, the same color, and painted two folding bistro chairs I already had, to match.

The other thing I did was make new cushion covers for our existing furniture. The old fabric was a brown & rust stripe that went with our old house but not this one. I think the green goes much better with the blue house and all of the greenery in the yard. The white railings tie in with the white trim on the house. That’s another one off my list!

I had noticed a couple of months ago that portion of the wall was bulging out, and other areas looked like they could go at any moment, too. I thought the volunteer cedar tree growing very close to that point was the problem. The tree had doubled in size in one year!  I didn’t want a 30 ft. tall tree in my front yard. So, I had my yard maintenance guy take it out. Of course, I would never have lived to see it get that big, but…it had to go…to no avail. The wall failed anyway.

Fortunately, Vicki’s soon-to-be son-in-law is a stone mason. So he’s rebuilding the wall for me. When he finally finishes it will be much nicer looking and stronger than it was.

Here’s a picture of the house with the wall, exactly one year ago (April 14, 2015):

As soon as it’s not raining I’ll take some pictures of the progress…

I bought some yellow mums for the urns on the two concrete “things” that flank the front steps. I don’t know what the word is for that architectural feature…does someone know? Oh, you can’t see them in this picture; I’ll post another photo too.

When I asked my friend, Vicki, how it looks, she said “Cheerful.” That’s good. That’s what I want!

Here’s a picture of the front showing the door—before. Just boring white. We also took out the overgrown boxwoods that were blocking the “concrete things” a while ago, so you can see the porch architecture better. Another thing I want to do is trim back the shrub on the right side, because you can hardly see that the wall slants—it gets wider at the bottom—another neat architectural feature of the house.

AND I’m going to paint the arch of the porch “cover” (another architectural term missing from my design vocabulary…) white to match the rest of the trim, so that it will stand out instead of blending with the body color.