House 173

We have old, cheap, poorly applied vinyl siding on the house.  I hate it.  No matter what we do to the house, it only looks as good as the siding - and that's best viewed at night.  "Eventually" (god, who knows when) I want to re-side the house, better siding, maybe even a different color.  In the meantime, and after putting new windows in the porch last summer, I just wanted the back porch to look better, right now.  The front porch is shingled, so I thought - why not?  Besides, shingles are pretty inexpensive.

Okay, I didn't exactly get a "before" picture, but at least this time I took one pretty early on in the project!


After removing the old, cheap vinyl siding, I found old, cheap, very thin insulation.  Ugh, I bet the whole house is "insulated" with this stuff!

It's always a scary proposition when you start digging around an old house, you just never know what's under there. Well, in this case it was clapboard. Old, broken, weak cl…

So, here is a glimpse of a "before" picture and the somewhat pathetic fence around the garden:


It was initially put up years ago to keep Bruegger, then Linus out.  It was made of furring strips and chicken wire and was only planned to be temporary.  Of course, 14 years is temporary, but nonetheless...a little longer than planned!  But I have to tell you - it still beat the original garden fence, what we thought would keep our beagle named Bruegger out -


Abject failure!!
Anyway, as is the case so often, this was one of those spur-of-the-moment projects.  It was a Saturday morning and I was looking around the yard for a quick project.  My eyes settled on the garden fence...the rest as they say, is history.  About five minutes later the old fence was gone...


I started out with some post holes.  Lucky for me it's been a very wet spring so the post holes (three of them) took about 20 minutes.  Then I stood back and planned what to do.  Off to Lowes to get a couple posts, cra…