Busy as a Squirrel in Fall

Scraping the trim to bare wood.

As happens every fall around here, we're busy finishing up projects before the weather gets cool.  That means painting the trim on the first floor of front of the house that was painstakingly scraped this summer.  Fortunately, the house is brick so the painting is minimal, but it's all pretty high off the ground.  And this is an old house, so of course, nothing is as easy as it seems.  There were some rotted boards that needed replacing and since our trim is not just plain old trim (there's crown molding and other details in it), replacing it wasn't always easy.  You can see from the pictures that some pretty nice lumber was used originally for the trim.  You can also see that we have 2 more stories of trim (and 4 more sides of the house!) to scrape to finish the exterior work.  Ah, to have more free time!

Painting the trim.

Before it gets any colder, we'll also be putting up some more new storm windows and finishing the attic insulation.  We've already made a huge dent in our energy costs with the insulation and new storm windows we've added so far, but there's always more you can do to an old house!

How we've addressed painting, scraping, insulation, and storm windows and how we might have done it greener are all topics for later postings, but the days are getting colder and we've got work to do!