Hey!!!! Nook over here.

      We finally did it. After two years in our home we finished our breakfast nook. I had added a window to bring more light in, and put up some old tin ceiling from a bar in nearby Cloquet, but that's where it stopped. It's basically been an area for dog food and extra dish towels. The nook tends to collect what we really should just toss away, except the dog food of course.
   
We talked a lot about what direction we wanted to go. We thought authentic, our first choice, but with the new window in there we could do the high backed seats we liked, We kind of screwed ourselves putting in that window. So we quickly went to the idea of benches. We toyed with that idea for about a year, then, without asking my better half, I did a little searching on Craigslist and found the perfect solution. Church pews.
   
      I purchased two 100+ year old church pews from a catholic church in Duluth. They were both 14 feet long, so I cut them down to the length of the nook, about 6 feet, then reattached the ends, no problem at all. They are the most sturdy seats I think you could ever sit in, especially for my fat ass.      

      Now what to do for a table? I had 10, 6 foot, sections of shiplap flooring used in a old Victorian home down the way. It was all full of staples, holes, and tar paper, perfect for a table. In no more than an hour I had the perfect table for our little nook.
     So that was that, all finished but the accessories. That will take a bit, but now we have a nice place to enjoy our breakfast and a little cribbage every once and a while.

Bye bye 1977...hello 1924?

     What was supposed to be a 4 year plan turned in to a 4 month plan. With me and Amber expecting our first child in April we decided to push forward with a few projects before all of our time was consumed with baby. The first? Take down all the plywood siding that was put on sometime in the mid 1970s. The siding wasn't in bad shape, but with a 12 inch reveal, it didn't fit the style of the home. To my surprise the 90 year old siding just underneath was in great shape, and only had 2 layers of paint on it, better yet, it was cedar, with a 2.5 inch reveal. And so it began, this project we wanted to do a side a year, we did in a side a month.

     I borrowed some scaffolding, set it up, and was on my way. I used a hammer and simple pry bar, one side took me about 4 hours to remove the siding, lathe (which was used to level the 1970s siding) and all the nails. Like I said, the 90 year old siding was in great shape, better than the stuff that was nearly half its age, so not a lot of repairs. Unfortunately when they installed metal flashing and window trim they cut the drip edge off all the windows, so that's what I spent the majority of my time on. Some of the wood was rotted along the chimney stack and front porch, as well as around the front (east facing) window, which sees most of the exposure. I hand scraped every square inch of our house, no pressure stripping, some heat stripping with an infrared paint stripper I made myself our of a restaurant salamander, everything I can do to help the new paint stick.

    

 All repairs done, now time for paint. Being that our house is one of the tallest on the block, we didn't want to get too bold with the colors, also, we're trying to stay as close to the 1924 original as we can. That being said, the house has been white its entire life, and that's fine, we'd stay with white if the shingles on the house were anything other than the black they are. I would love a white house if we had green shingles, but they were replaced just before we moved in, so that won't be for 30+ more years. So what to do? There are lot's of grey, tan, white, and brick houses in our neighborhood, and only a couple of green houses and no yellow houses. We naturally leaned towards yellow, but after testing a couple spots on the house we realized that it wasn't going to work. A warm color like that on such a big house, on a corner, was a bit much. So how about green? That's my wife's favorite color, so after testing every green we could find we finally settled on one. Sherwin Williams Hardware 6172, which is almost a grey color. We kept going back and forth between 6172 and one shade darker Cocoon 6173. We decided the lighter of the two would look better on a larger scale. On our window trim we went with Aesthetic White 7035, and window detail almost black with Andiron 6174.

     All the hard decisions were made, we scheduled time to do the deed. Unfortunately, living in northern Wisconsin, we had a deep freeze come pretty early this year. It came 3 days before we were to prime the house. So that's where we are with that. It was kind of cool around Halloween, our house looked like an old haunted house with all the scraped wood, but we are looking forward for spring. The house will have a new fresh coat of paint, and we'll have a new baby to show it to. Here's to the new year.