I just went through my photos on the photo card of my digital camera & put in some of the photos of my farm under eskielover in the photo area. The first is a photo of my house with my July 4 decorations. I still have to finish the front porch.....have to paint the railing & change the wooden lattice work to the vinyl (which I have sitting in my garage waiting for my to cut it to the right size). I spent the other day pressure washing the wood.....it was so grungy & green. Now the wood is just like new after pressure washing it. That is a rather fun job. I also bought some pretty wooden scroll work to put on either side of the spindle posts......that is going to be a pretty addition too. I am changing all the grey to a green colour. I picked out the historical green for the area which is "copper verde". The shutters on the upstairs windows are missing in the photo because I have them down in the garage & in the process of putting on 4 coats of the green paint. I wish I could have found the right colour green without painting, but they don't come close....even with the distance between the roof & the porch.

All the windows & the wood around the windows are rotten, so they have to be replaced....a huge job, but I found a carpenter who does excellent work. I am using the white vinyl clad, double hung windows, so I won't have so much maintainance & I can clean inside & outside from inside the house. I think the white will give the house a much nicer appearance than the gray. I also need to get better rain gutters than the ones they have, & while looking at the gutters, we noticed that they were a light gray colour instead of a white. Painting them will only make more work in the long run, so I might as well get new ones while work is being done on that part of the house anyway. They are also going to put metal covering around all the wood on the eves, so there won't be any maintainance on that either. I never realized how much the humidity causes wood to rot....coming from the California desert, that wasn't even something I ever thought about....now I am learning a whole new set of thinking.

The photo of the pool, I am very proud of.....it took alot of frustration transforming it from a green, gookie, bug infested pond to what it is now.....wish I had taken a before photo of that. I got into it the other day & finished cleaning the last few tiny green spots off the bottom. I also threw in photos of the driveway to my barn area being graded.....actually, my neighbor was grading his driveway for his new home & I tagged onto his project because it was exactly where I needed my driveway. We split the cost of that & also the costs for getting our electrical back onto our property. That couldn't have worked out better if I had planned it.....it is amazing how everything is coming together in ways I had never imagined. My wooded area was all overgrown since no one ever went down there much, so I had one man come & run his bush hog all over the area......my it is even more park like than it first looked like. There is more useable land than what it looked like when I purchased it too, so everything is even better than what I initially thought I had bought.

I have even more photos, but ran out of space.....I will have to delete some of the other photos & put more in as time goes by. The transformation is amazing. I like natural wood, so decided to take out the old painted doors & put in natural wood ones that I am going to stain. When it came to installing the doors to the dining room, we noticed that they didn't actually fit so I decided to make them into archways & put the doors into a couple of the upstairs doorways that they fit into. I have a beautiful semi circle window in my dressing area, so I had them make the entrance into an arch there also. It is all coming together in time. It sure is a lot of fun putting my own touches into this house.

Hope you enjoy the photos,
Debbie