Exterior motives

It has been quite awhile since I last posted here.  Time has a way of slipping by when you are in the thick of busyness.

Here are some outside photos of the house (mostly, but not fully completed).  Quite a difference from when I first bought it.  It is a continual work in progress.  I have yet to do anything significant on the inside, so no pictures of that to be posted here yet.  Here and there I have shared some on Facebook, but the interior is still pretty disorganized and not nearly to the point where I wish to go plastering pictures of my messy house all over this blog. lol.  I am not, by nature, a great housekeeper.  I much prefer the outside work.  (Though I despise sun worshiping for the sake of tanning, I do love being out in the yard and even being inside planning my future plantings.  Oh, and I like walks when I can manage to eek out the time to take them.)  Plus the outside color of my house is so cheery that I brightens my mood to see it at its best on a sunny day.

I think my contractor and his brother (the both of which did the majority of the work, though his son and son-in-law joined in now and then) did a most phenomenal job of it.  I am so pleased with its outcome so far.

The side porch you see with the weeds growing up around it is on the south side of the house.  As you might notice the upper enclosed balcony was removed and the door from my master bedroom replaced with a window.  The lower part of that porch structure has been demolished since the taking of this picture and rebuilt with pressure-treated lumber which has yet to be painted since the lumber had to cure (or something like that) for a minimum of 6 months before painting.  A set of stairs was also added leading toward the direction of the backyard.  Initially, they started to scrape the paint since they thought they could just paint over the existing wood, except for installing the new set of stairs at the back of it.  But it was found that the supports were too rotted at the bottom from lack of upkeep in protecting them from the elements, so it all had to come down and be rebuilt.

You can see half the south-facing exterior and the access to the basement are not painted in this picture.