Phase Complete

The last couple posts were about the gable and the oriel. In this post I want to pull them together and add a couple other things that have been finished. I think I have finally come to accept the fact that the exterior of the house - oh hell, forget about the exterior, the whole house is never really done. But in this case, this phase (ha! phase connotes a plan!) is done, and the changes have been pretty dynamic! I'll show a couple befores and point out some details, so bear with me. This first picture is from several years ago...this'll set the tone:

OMG!  That wisteria, the stuff of nightmares!  And there's that dreaded rust on the fascia.  It's a funny thought how a house develops over time...at one point we were quite proud of how 173 was looking, now looking back!!!

Now...

So that was the front with the gable being the most recent development.  Then there was the oriel.  This shot was from 2001 when I put in the fence (look how orange it looked!). 

Then I sided the porch and installed shutters, and decided any window that didn't have shutters would be trimmed in black:

But after the gable was done and there were lots of leftovers and scraps well...the oriel was done and the windows were trimmed in white to match how the gable looked.

Just a ton more interesting!

Last summer I did a lot of work on the north side of 173, but didn't get the shutters on and didn't trim the kitchen window:

And now:

Then there was the back of the house.  For decades there was an antenna attached at the top.  Mr. Mosher had that thing attached so it would NEVER come down....it always freaked me out as a lightning rod!  Then there was that whole no shutters - black trim thing.

Now:

What's hard to see there is that the returns are now sloped to kinda match the sloped pediment in the front gable.  Just a nice little detail.

And look at that window!!  What you probably couldn't see in the "before" pic is that the frame on the storm window had rust all over it from rain dripping of the antenna.  So up I went and painted it with the ol' Rustoleum.  That isn't me in this next pic, but I wanted you to get a sense how high up that window is.

And here's a shot of the window:

And now a couple random beauty shots!

So, good start to the 2016 outdoor season!