Happy New Year everyone! This is the perfect time for fresh starts and so...I finally present to you: Wrightwood. Lets be honest, I probably should have started with this post but I just got so EXCITED and had to post the other stuff! Having seen the inside of the house as it was when we bought it - you might be thinking "oh honey, why??". THIS is why. Look at this pretty lady! True, when we bought her she had massive holes in the roof (I visited one day when it was raining and a witnessed water pouring down the inside face of a wall), tenacious vines were growing in and out of the walls, vinyl siding, and some sort of scary, cementitious, yellow paint covering everything. Forty-five completely out-of-shape wood frame double hung windows that needed repairing. First things first, we fixed that roof, I started obsessively watching you-tube videos about how to repair 100-year-old windows, and we got right on fixing her all up.
We removed the vinyl siding all over the house to reveal the original wood, waterfall siding...which then needed to all be sanded down and prepped for priming and painting. We also updated the front porch area. The structure was all there, but we faced out the columns to give them a more proportionate and stately appearance and we added a banister to the upstairs balcony that brought the handrail up to code (and made it look even fancier...form AND function? My favorite!). In the upper eaves we replaced the pressed vinyl panels that looked like shingles with actual cedar shingles - they're really beautiful, but they stand out pretty extremely now that the house is painted. We're really unsure what we're going to do in the end.
Picking paint colors is a whole different ball game. Exterior colors are tough...you need to test a large enough swatch on the wall to really see it. And you need to try it on all sides of the house and give yourself enough time to observe it in different lighting conditions and at different times of day. Oh boy did we ever test colors. I actually lost count; yellows, grays, blues. For a couple weeks my life felt like that scene in Devil Wears Prada..."You know, it's just that all these blue paints look exactly the same to me...".
But they aren't
They're close, but one is too green, one is too purple, too light, too dark, turquoise, lapis, cerulean...we were getting down to the wire, the primer was on (and oh so green, but what a difference!)...we needed to make a decision.
We pulled the trigger on a really crisp, clean gray: (Sherwin Williams' "Online" - the most modern thing to happen to this house in decades).
Every time I look at these images I get giddy! This house is just so dang good-looking! Theres still a lot of work to be done: touch ups, clean ups, and some final decisions on the colors of the columns out front. There is a skirt that runs around the base of the entire house. The skirt is constructed of wider siding and flares out from the walls to direct water away from the foundation of the house. And it's cute. We'll be painting it a subtly darker shade of gray than the all over house color. As you can also see: all the window trim has been painted white and the window frames themselves are dark, charchol-y gray - the resulting effect is modern, clean and updated but at the same time effortlessly classic. Another color we were super excited about picking (and you can see just a little sneak peek of in the after shot) is the porch ceiling blue - known in some parts as "haint" blue. I'll get a little more into that process, the history of blue porch ceilings and the color we finally chose a little later. (The color we chose is perfect.)
The tile for the kitchen floors is getting picked up today, and I've been working madly on drawings to get this baby permitted so we can get her inspected and really get the interior moving along! Plumbing, electrical, all the guts need to be updated and checked out by the city before we can get to the fun stuff on the inside. This doesn't mean we haven't been hard at work planning for what we want to happen. Get pumped, prettier posts are on the horizon!
