Normandy Park Restoration

Adding some landscape lighting to the front of the house.  I figure worst case if we don't close, I can take these with me.  Experimenting with LED bulbs using a 5w MR16, the results are very nice.  The uplight closest to the front door has the LED bulb, the rest are stock 50w hallogens.  With the LED bulbs I can run a lot more lights on one ballast.  I'll be adding about 3-4 more lights later.

Finally getting rid of all the junk the previous owner left in the house, heading to the dump tomorrow.

We're set to close on the 15th of October, so I'm getting a little braver with my fixes and updates.  I realize I want a little experience with the new airless sprayers before I tackle painting the exterior of the house.  I also know that once I pull down the ceiling tiles in the basement, I'll want something to make it look decent while I'm working on the wiring and rearranging the upstairs.  I thought I'd do a dark paint on the exposed wood.  I'd seen pictures of that done in basements before and liked the look.  The basements in this house are about 8" tall, a little lower than that when duct work or plumbing is a factor, so while not low, it can't hurt to have a dark look to improve the height of the ceiling. So, I figured I'd start by painting the ceiling in the unfinished part of the basement.  Here are some before pictures:  The paint I used was the same dark flat Olive Green I'd used on the lighting plate in the bathroom.  It...

There was some really ugly chicken wire used to keep pets in on the back wall of the carport.  This had also allowed a lot of branches, pine needles, and pine cones to build up behind the carport.  Since my plan is to enclose the carport, I'll need to cover this back area and reframe it.  Can't do that till after I close, but I need to clean up in order to do that, so I got back there, trimmed back the bushes to allow access, and removed all the waste.  Ended up about 4 Home Depot yard waste bags full.  Didn't get a before picture, but did get an after picture:

Just went under contract, won't close till October 15th, but I needed to take care of some weather exposure before then.  Here is a shot of the paint which has worn off of the main beams on the back of the house. I put some color matching primer on them.  Once we close (or get close to closing) I'll start doing some proper painting.  The white wash on the undersides will be white and the beam will be navy blue.  But at least for now the wood is protected.  Here is an after shot. The color of the house really is bad, it's a putty color, with white wash under the eaves in the back, but all putty in the front.  Definitely needs some sprucing up.