New House Blog: Episode LXXXX - The Houselift

You may remember our New House's facelift from this Episode.  Well, we decided to do something similar, but on a larger scale, so we had a hole houselift.

Houselift Part One

It started, as other things have, with the door-to-door salesman.  Door-to-door salesmen have been good to us in this neighborhood (remember the solar guy and our meat guy?), so we let him come in and talk to us about painting our New House (and our New House was in great need of new paint) - but not just any paint; he was specifically going to talk to us about a fancy high-tech type of house paint that is guaranteed for 40 (yes, forty) years instead of the typical 5 years you get with regular latex paint.  And he had a fancy demo device that demonstrated this high-tech paint's waterproof-yet-breathable nature (using our tap water).  The demo was convincing, and not having to repaint for 40 years sounded good to us, so we looked at the bountiful color palette and made plans to have our new House painted.  Two other contributing factors were that our existing paint was getting mildewed in a few places; and our New House was not painted one uniform color when we bought it - it was three or four distinct shades of off-white: it would be nice to have a house painted one continuous color.

Flushing Update

You may remember from this Episode that we had been having some troubles with our downstairs 1/2 bath toilet, and we thought we had the troubles resolved.  Well, we were mistaken - our troubles continued and built up to the point where the toilet ran and ran and the tank never filled up.  So we decided to take the drastic step of replacing the entire inner workings of the tank and flush mechanism.

For the benefit of those who don't recall, our 1/2 bath and our upstairs toilet have fancy compressed-air units in their tanks that perform the flushing action, so persuading one of them to stop running is a little more complicated than it is on your standard flushing mechanism.  Here's a picture of the unit in question.

As you can see, there is some water at the bottom of the tank, and the tank should be completely dry.  You can also see that the wall behind the toilet never got completely painted.

Replacing the in-tank assembly required removing the tank, and we took this opportunity to paint the wall.

The old unit on the right, and the new unit on the left.

This is the new unit installed, and as you can see, the tank is dry, as it should be - all of the water is supposed to stay inside the inner tank.

Look at that.  It's nice and level.  And so far the new assembly seems to be working as it should.









Houselft Part Two

In addition to paint color and type, we had to decide what to do with the wooden facade of our New House - do we leave it as-is and have the paint guys repair it, or do we cover it with stucco and pretend it never existed?  We chose to do the latter.  We also chose to keep the wood framing round the windows, front door, and garage door, instead of getting those newfangled moldings that you see on other houses that have been facelifted.

The first team of workers came to our New House and installed the chicken wire and tar paper, and that crew was great.  They didn't trample our succulents or break any of our little solar yard lights.

Look at that chicken wire.  And those not-trampled succulents.

This is a pile of old, damaged wood, and a rain spout or two.

It looks better already!












Alas, we cannot say that the next crew was as kind to our succulents or solar yard lights.  They did great stucco work, but in the proccess they blindly and callously walked on top of and through our succulent garden with no regard for our succulent friends (we mentioned this damage in the previous Episode).  And they broke at least one of our little solar yard lights.  They were the most careless of the crews that worked on our houselift. The company did compensate us somewhat, but we were quite annoyed.  As I said, they did good stucco work, as you can see below.

This is the first layer of stucco.  The workers were kind enough to leave the back door uncovered so that we could go in and out of the house.

This is more of the first layer of stucco.

This is the final layer of stucco.  Even unpainted it looks like a brand new house, except for the cable dangling in front of the window.

That's some nice texturing.

New stucco, meet old stucco.  And here are some more dangling cables that the stucco guys dislodged.

















Harvest Time

Some of our fruit trees have yielded bountiful harvests this year.  Our pear and nectarine trees, in particular, were extremely fruitful.

This photo shows only a part of the bountiful harvest.  We have harvested more pears this year than in the previous three years combined, and there are still a lot of pears ripening on our tree.  We think that the pear tree is doing much better this year because of our ongoing vigilance in keeping it free of fire blight.


Houselift Part Three

And now what you have all been waiting for, or what you impatient ones have skipped ahead for, the reveal of our houselift results.  See for yourself.

Voila!  Our houselift is complete.  As you can see, the painters did a marvelous job of masking off our house number, and the mailbox is now much closer to being level.

This is how our New House looked when we first bought it.

Continuing around to the garage area.  The colors we chose are Blue Glow for the main color and Burgundy Dash for the trim.

There was some left-over primer and paint in both colors, so let us know if you need something painted and you want the paint to last for forty (yes, 40) years.

The maker of the paint claims that this paint actually reflects the sun's heat, resulting in cooler wall temperatures.

We finish up with these two pictures of the back of the house.  How many different shades of off-white do you see in this first picture?

Finally, our New House has walls of one color all the way around!












Happy painting.
    bIsh