Big Progress in October

Lots of planning around here for the last year or so... And suddenly this month there is so much activity and progress!

1)  Kris has almost finished the fence.  It's like 95% done.  In September we finally got a payout from the guy's insurance, one year after the accident with the fence.  Kris has just some tweaks to do on the fence panels at the back of the alley, and then we need to put up the chain link at the back of the property.

2)  Broadway Street was repaved this week!  And became a 3-lane instead of the dangerous 4-lane that it's been for who knows how long....  The very day that our fence was run into was the first meeting of the Broadway St Task Force.  I showed up kinda shell-shocked and said, "My fence was hit by a car this morning."  "Ohhhhh, that house!"  Everyone in the room knew about it. 
For the last year, the task force worked with the transportation departments from Hennepin County and Minneapolis; held community open houses for information and feedback; surveyed as many commuters, business, and residents as we could; ran websites for additional feedback...  And came up with a 3-phase plan for the road.

Repaving was already scheduled, like years in advance, so this week that happened.  And when the new asphalt was on, the new lines were painted for one lane traveling each direction + a turn lane in the middle.  I am so flipping happy, I can't even explain!
Grinding down the previous layers of asphalt also uncovered our curbs!  For the first time in 7+ years of owning this house, we have curbs in front of like half of our house.  Something so simple.

3)  We finally got our roof replaced!!  It was in ugly condition when we bought the house, for sure.  For years we debated if we wanted to add dormers off the top floor or maybe build an actual 2nd story...  And eventually we decided to just leave it as is.  We got a new roof put on a couple weeks ago, and a crew is here at this very moment putting on our brand-new gutters.  :-)   We also got a new mailbox because the demo crew trashed ours....  
And Kris pulled off the lattice and wood where the chimney used to be, so that the soffits and gutters could be put in as one solid piece, instead of taking those little jogs like they used to.  So now there is a gap in the siding... one more thing to repair.

Garage Shingles

A few days ago, K decided it would be a much better use of her time to hire a crew to shingle the roof of our garage.  She's so busy with work, and she figured it would take much longer for just her and her brother to finish the roof than it would take for a crew to just knock it out.  And it would cost about $1200 more, from the bids she was getting.

I agreed.  If it was actually going to save us money in the long run, AND save her a ton of headache and time-- it was completely a no-brainer.

I headed out in the morning to go to the farmers market, and then hung out for the day with my bestie and her kids, and by the time I got home...  they were done. Amazing.

Love it!

Design Plans - Update

I've been meaning to post these for a week or so...  I asked K to send me the sketches she made on Google Sketch-Up of her ideas for replacing the siding.

These pictures also include her idea for dormers on the front of the house.  With a flat roof on each dormer to give them a more modern look, rather than the traditional   ^  peak.  Though traditional to a Cape Cod style house, I thought that type of peak looked older and much less modern than we'd like to go for.

If we do end up going with the cement-board that we've looked at, our siding colors will be more gray and less blue than these pictures.  But it's easier to see the variation in these sketches, since they aren't all gray.

The palette, so far...

Lots of new siding, and lots of variation in the siding.  This will allow us to use up the little bit of un-returnable scrap that K has accumulated, and also play a bit with the color and design.  We're also considering rock for the bottom section.  And there's my Neptune Green door!

Her plan includes a small new porch off the front of the house, and off to the right side.  Since we took off the awning over the front door, we don't have a roof covering the door, and we are definitely missing that when it's raining or snowing.

Keeping the privacy fence on the right side of the house is a must.  Some bedroom windows face this side, and the fence provides privacy from the street.  The yard is also out of view of the busy streets, which makes it really comfortable back there.

Doesn't the house look awake and cute with those dormers??  K also widened the triple window in the front.  We will replace these windows someday, and we could make the side windows wider when we do so, creating a larger panel of windows.  The other window in the front is also larger than we currently have-- I think she wants to center the window in that bedroom.

Annnnnnd...  K gets her white picket fence.  It sounds like she's wanted one of these for a while, or maybe just for this house.  But I think it will look great.  And, it will do much better at keeping litter out of our yard than our current fence, since the boards are much closer together.

This side roof over the mudroom is about the only thing we could do to make a "Mod 50's" roof on our house, without drastically changing our second level (not that we're totally opposed to changing that.)

Currently, the peak of this roof is right in the middle, and there is a metal awning extending out past the door.  If we remove the awning, and if K builds out the step in front of the door, we can also extend the roof out at that sort of low "modern" pitch.

It's a possibility!  Not sure how or when we'll get to the outside of the house, but it's really fun to think about.

Cape Cod Style?

Our little house is a pretty traditional Cape Cod style, which was popular in the 1950s.

Picture from About.com

K is thinking of putting a couple of dormer windows out the front of the house, to make it a little more interesting.  And that would still fit with keeping the style authentic to the time period.  It would also change how the roof is vented, so we wouldn't need those square vents on top anymore.  The ones that are on there now are rusting, and I wish we didn't need them because they interrupt that long, continuous roof.

Picture from About.com

But in doing dormers, I thought it looked a little too traditional, considering that we are going for mid-century modern on the inside.  We can do whatever we want to this little place, let's make it fun! 

I pulled out my newspaper and magazine clippings and showed K a few houses that really caught my eye.  The difference between most of these houses and our house, is that they are ranches with long, low roofs, where ours is a 1.5 story with a totally different roof line.  But K understood what I meant-- let's incorporate some of these lines where we can, and she hopped back on Google Sketch-Up and started altering her plans.

How can we mesh a look like this with our house?  We're working on it..

We plan to do cement-board when we replace our siding, and so we started looking at our color options for that.  There isn't a huge color selection, so it was pretty easy to come up with our "palette." 

Cement board palette + door paint

I can't wait to paint the front door something bright!!  I'm leaning towards a turquoise or teal, right now.  I had been thinking about an intense green, but once I saw these siding colors, I think that something with blue in it will be better.