This Flippin’ House – Painting Grand River

Ever priced out painting a house?  Been taken back by the four figure number?  Trust me, its not unjustified.  However, if you know myself or my family, you know we’re not about to fork over fistfuls of cash when we could buy the tools, do it ourselves, have the tools when we’re done, and have a huge sense of accomplishment.

When we bought Grand River, we invested in a Wagner Paint Crew airless paint sprayer.  The thing literally paid for itself in the first hours of use, and it has only gotten better.  We have refinished the kitchen cabinets at Grand River, refinished kitchen cabinets at my parent’s latest flip, and embarked upon saving a healthy sum of money by painting Grand River ourselves.

The project began last Fall with a trial run on the back of the garage.  It went well, but I wasn’t entirely certain about the color.  We got a new color, and started again this week.  Instead of arduously masking off every window, trim piece, inch of foundation, etc, I opted for using a piece of cardboard (pizza box to be specific) to mask as I went along.  Long story short – I will never mask of anything with cut up garbage bags and painters tape again.  In a few short hours, I was able to paint as high as I could reach on both the front and side of the house.

Assuming rain holds off, we’ll be renting a hydraulic lift to reach the upper areas of this mammoth 1916 Colonial, along with painting/repairing the fascia boards and possibly installing gutters.

Right now the color isn’t sitting right with me, it just doesn’t seem to jive well with the rest of the house.  I’m sure once we’re done, have the shutters mounted and the foundation repainted that it’ll be perfect though!  I’m certainly not shelling out $130 for another bucket of paint, nor am I going to spend the countless hours it would take to repaint the entire structure.

Gettin’ Stuff Done – Big Yards Mean Big Landscaping

The Grand River Manor has a massive property.  Massive properties usually are accompanied by substantial landscaping, which leads to substantial challenges.  Little marigolds and poppies wouldn’t be enough to get things in shape here, we needed big stuff.  The front of the property was already adorned by shrubbery that has likely been growing here for decades.  Last year we started getting it pruned up and back in order after letting it grow wild for a few years.  This year, however, we’re making dramatic improvements to the property and landscaping.

The front yard got its shrubs trimmed up and a trailer load of mulch to make things look a little more kept up. The back yard, however, is a completely different story.  With half an acre of woods, sloping spots in the yard, a cut-up, fallen tree waiting to be split, and lots of open space, we needed something drastic.  Last summer, Greg took it upon himself to get a path built into the forest so it wasn’t dead space, but rather usable acreage.  We’ll be expanding that path this year, and making a clearing in the middle of the forest for some shaded, yet open, space.

Last weekend, I rented a roto-tiller to build us some gardens along the border of the forest.  Previously, weeds, vines, and other forest plants grew rampant and had slowly been encroaching on the yard; year after year choking out usable space.  No more!  The tiller made short work of that mess, and gave us a 2′ wide garden to plant things in.  Some wooden borders finish off the look.  Seeds are planted for 10-15 different varieties of wild flowers that should keep some color all summer long.  I’ll post photos once things start growing.

Along the patio, we installed the border garden with the garden trellises.  The garden is going to be a dual-purpose flower and vegetable garden.  The patio itself is getting a facelift by removing/burning/killing all of the weeds growing in the cracks between the flag stones.  We’ve also started piling the split wood up on raised boards to prevent rotting.  There’s probably 8-10 face cord of wood waiting to be split, but that’s a project for another time.

The excess dirt from tilling up the gardens has been used to fill in some low spots in the yard.  Some of those low spots are natually ocurring features of the yard.  Others… well, others were created by the pent up energy of a 1 year old Husky Puppy.  What a jerk.  But they’re filled in now, and if I can keep her from digging, the grass should come back this year just fine.

Gettin’ Stuff Done – Garden Trellises

It has been a long term goal of mine to spruce up the back yard a bit, especially around the patio.  The uneven flagstone and concrete patio definitely feels harsh when you first walk out, but seeing the piles of wood yet to be split, the broken concrete driveway, and the entire yard…  I’m not going to say I was looking for a warm zen feeling when we walked outside, but rather more it always left me with a sense of being exposed and functioned as a constant reminder of all the things I have left to do.

A trip to Home Depot provided the inspiration of using Garden Trellises; but they were $15+ each!  I estimated we’d need about 5-6 of them, which meant about $90 worth of supplies.  Turns out we’d wind up needing 8, bringing the total cost to $120.  Screw that!  We bought some weather treated 2x4s and ripped them into 1x1s.  Five 2x4s yielded enough material for 8 trellises which took a total of about an hour to build once I had a pattern down.

Installing them wasn’t very difficult either.  A small sledge hammer, tall ladder and some elbow grease.  I did use some spare 1x1s to run a string level around the patio to get all of them installed as close to evenly as humanly possible.  Unfortunately, the 1x1s have little ability to resist any twisting forces from installation, so a couple of them are a little crooked.  They’ll get supported soon.

Gettin’ Shit Done

Lets face it.  I could come straight out and say ” no excuses, things will get better,” but we all know that’d be a lie.  The degree of that lie is directly proportional to the amount of energy I have and how much GSD I’ve taken today.  Before any of you freak out that I’m on drugs, GSD is the street name for Gettinshitdone, a new motivator I’ve found that works pretty well.  Not available over the counter – so ask your pharmacist.

At any rate, since the last post, I realized a few things:

One, I’m a busy guy.  Between working full time, taking care of ze puppy, maintaining my car, fixing up Grand River, looking for a house of my own, and the other various musings of mine, I have next to no time to work on this blog.  I blame myself mostly.

Two, this blog has taken a scary turn for the worse.  As I look back, I used to post lots about projects and doing things.  Lately, it’s been all about cooking.  Don’t get me wrong, cooking is great and all, but everyone and their grandma’s has a cooking blog, and that’s just not what I want to do. Sure there’ll be the occasional smattering of how to cook this, or something interesting I found to eat, but largely I’m going to wrangle this sucker in to being more concerned with projects than cooking.

Three, everyone needs a healthy dose of GSD.  It does the body good.

So where do we go from here?  Whenever I’ve had a spare minute, I’ve done a brain dump of something that I think is a potential candidate for a post.  I’ll email it to myself, and by the evening if I’m able to find photos of the things I’m working on and get them updated ASAP so I can do another internal review prior to posting.

Long story short, I’m rolling this blog into my GSD train.  Don’t fret, that train never stops.  It may slow down and let you casually tuck and roll into the station but it’s never gonna stop.