Old Houses are Fun

We’re nearing the last days of temperatures climbing up into the sixties and seventies, so we’ve been getting some maintenance taken care of outside. A couple of windows on the south side of the house needed new sills, one new plinth, and a storm window repaired. We took down a planter beneath our main living room window to get to some of the areas in need of attention. We’ll hang on to it should we ever decide to rehang the thing and actually plant some annuals in it, but that’s why the siding looks a little funny there.

Did you catch the nice bit of peeling paint there toward the bottom? (It’s, uh, hard to miss.) We diverted our heating exhaust out of the side of the house last year when we replaced the boiler, but now there’s steam hitting the house off and on all day, everyday from October through March when the heat is on. The chimney is shot (which we knew about from the start), so we opted for the new vent when we upgraded to a high-efficiency unit that ties into our hot water system, but the steam caused some paint to peel near the hose spigot. The rest held because it’s relatively new siding (20 years old), but the original stuff was coming off in sheets.

The old paint was scraped off down to the bare wood, then repainted. We’ll see how it holds through the winter. The rest of the house is fine, so hopefully the new paint will last, but if not, we’ll have to see about changing the exhaust vent somehow. And the you can see one of the windows that were repaired there, too. Except, oops, wrong purple. There are seven colors of paint on the house (two purples, three taupes, a pink, and a teal), and sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re putting the wrong one up because the shades are similar, and paint always looks different when it’s wet. The correct color will go on today or tomorrow.

We hired someone for the repairs since I’m still on kid + baby duty while Brandon is recovering from his surgery. We also had part of the front porch screwed down where it had popped up, which now feels nice and sturdy. Then work started on the railing out front. There was a small spot that had sunk in, about the size of a quarter — maybe a smidge bigger. We knew that meant there was some wood rot, but we didn’t know the extent of it until work was underway.

Yikes. It’s a relatively easy fix, at least, though it takes some time. Scrape out all of the bad stuff to start, and let it dry (moisture was getting in and causing the damage). Then you come back and fill it all in with epoxy, molding it as best you can to the right shape. Let that dry, sand it down, then coat the whole repair job in paint. We need another coat on there, but you can tell it’s way better already.

Eventually the chimney I mentioned will need to be addressed. Either tuckpoint it again (apparently it has been done multiple times already) and hope it holds now that it is no longer in use, or remove the whole thing and either rebuild it (for aesthetics?) or extend the siding and pretend it was never there. Not looking forward to all of that, but we’ll likely give tuckpointing one last try.

The downspout up there has separated from the gutters way up there, which is also being fixed this week. It’s doing something to the windows, so there may be a bit more damage to repair in that area, too. Just doing our best to keep up with the old gal.