Front Facade

Joan from For the Love of a House asked me about the placement of the staircases I showed in the last post when I was whining about my new anorexic porch.  Joan recently did an amazing, large-scale, most likely painful overhaul of her antique New Hampshire farmhouse which is well worth seeing.  I'm taking the slow torture route. 

Anyway, back to the staircases.  The staircases in the photos are secondary side staircases for the owners who are too lazy to walk down their front steps and over to their driveways to get to their cars.

These new photos of the same houses show the main staircase that goes to the front door.  I'm planning to turn what's left of my front lawn into a garden bed...

...so I'll have the same "public" staircase to the front door for salespeople, Greenpeace, etc., who will now be able to see through the new sidelights that I'm avoiding them.  But I'll also have the same little staircase on that far side of the deck that gives me access to the side garden.  So my "lazy" staircase will rarely be used making it possible for some kind of bench or something to be placed there without me tripping on it after a few Cranberry Bog martinis.  So that's my answer to Joan's question...just in case you were wondering too.

The new longer windows have been ordered for the two living room windows.  The door and sidelights are another story.  The stock Simpson sidelights were 12" wide and I have only about 8" for each one.  They suggested a few cu$tom $idelight option$ but my contractor said he's experienced a 12-week turnaround on custom pieces from Simpson so he wants to make them himself.  I'm a little hesitant about it but I'm starting to trust his judgment and since I can't see a picture of what Simpson will make, I think it's a better option. 

The pediment is stripped of the vinyl and aluminum trim and it's happily in really good shape except for one little corner where it looks like squirrels went to work on it.  Retaining all of this trim saves quite a bit of money so even though ripping out all of the extra lathing strips and plaster required extra labor, I still might be able to work copper gutter into my budget.

I think the front facade is looking pretty good.  I'm really looking forward to seeing the porch roof take shape because that will really start to make it look like a Greek Revival house.

The columns have not yet been ordered because they're going to be custom and we want to make sure all of the roof details are perfect before the final measurements are made.  I was fully expecting the columns were going to be made out of wood but the architects and every contractor advised against it.  "The wood today isn't the same as the old-growth wood they used to be made out of." "They'll blow apart in several years and you'll have to replace them."  These are just a few of the reasons I've heard in favor of composite, even from my contractor is the most purist of the bunch. 

He says, "Put about eight coats of paint on 'em, and no one will know."

"I'll know."

"No, I promise.  They'll be fine."

"Well, the day you install them, I'll go away for a few days so you can put about eight coats of paint on them and maybe they'll be fine."

I looked at the price of wood thinking I might just replace them every ten years but at nearly $1800 apiece x 4 columns, the composite is looking a little better. 

We're getting the columns from Pacific Columns (let me know if you know anything bad about them) who has a really neat on-line column builder (aside from the annoying dude that keeps popping up to talk to you).  So the next time you're really bored, you might want to check out their website and build yourself some virtual columns just for fun.  You can really do something crazy like mix a Scomozzi capital with an Attic base.  There's hours of fun here.

I'm very conservative so I'm going with a Tuscan capital (although Roman Ionic would be an adventurous alternative for me)...

...with a Tuscan base...

...a fluted shaft  (mm-hmm, I know; I'm a wild one) ...

...that's 12" at the base (which is 10" at the top to match the width of the pilasters (cornerboards)...

...8 feet tall.  And you're done!

You can submit what you "built" and get a quote from them.  Their turnaround is about 3 weeks (allegedly) and they're shipped straight to your porch.

You can even print out a spec sheet that spells out the dimension of every last facet. 

Now I'm starting my research on shutters.  There are apparently "Boston" shutters, "New York" shutters and even neighborhood variations of each like the "Beacon Hill" version of the "Boston" shutter that has larger louvers.  I haven't found a Cambridge shutter but who knew?  It's crazy. And I'm falling for it.

The "Boston" shutter has "horns" at the bottom like this version above...

...but it should look more like this one.

I'll let you know how that works out.

Expectations

Let me segue from my last post by quoting my art teacher, Lisa Forster Beach, from Stowe, Vermont: "Expectations, whether your own, or another's for you, are burdening..."

When I first saw the drawing of my house at the Cambridge Historical Commission showing my house had a front porch, I began to visualize how it might look if I were to rebuild it. It might have a vintage swing with inviting canvas cushions and a few potted plants on its shiny new deck....

...or maybe a few old rocking chairs

in front of the shutters

and barley twist plant stand

with a potted caladium.

I think these

would be

reasonable expactations.

But when I got home from work on Friday,

this was the sight.

Expectations... [insert sound of screeching brakes]...crushed.

Maybe it's a mistake.

So I ran into the house and grabbed the measuring tape.

Nope.

3' 10" just like it should be; in fact, the finished size should be 3' 10"

so it will be a little bigger than it was originally.

I was expecting a friend to stop by so we could go out dinner and I was still outside when he drove up. Now, let me preface this by saying this is a friend who asked me last week if I'm going to be siding the house with "those long strips or the little squares." (Translation: clapboards or shingles) He gets out of the car, looks at the house and asks, "Where's the rest of your porch?"

There's really nothing I can do about it at this point but it makes me start to wonder, is this going to look ridiculous?

So I made a trip down the street to take another look at the Greek Revivals down on the next block.

This one looks the same as mine.

So does this one.

Why did I never notice how narrow the porches were?

Oh, I guess it was those "expectations" that clouded my vision.

So what were these porches for? I know people were smaller in 1842 but a porch this size would barely allow for someone to sit in a chair without their feet hanging off the front of the porch. It's almost like it's just for decoration. A fancy brooch on the front of its new dress.

That's okay.

No swing with inviting canvas cushions.

No old rocking chairs.

Maybe a barley twist plant stand with a potted caladium.

All is good. Or should I not have that expectation?

My Artwork

This post may seem a little bit of a non sequitur but several people have asked me to show some of my artwork. Art is something I've pursued because I enjoy the creating and I love learning. It's also a nice balance to a job that's very uncreative. A lot of my work takes place in my head; there's a great deal of planning in most of it. I've never done it with the idea that I'd be selling it or showing it in a gallery. It's totally for me.

Let me start by saying I've always felt that artistic talent was innate. You either have it or you don't. I remember trying many times as a child and teenager to draw or paint. It was always something I wanted to do, but the results were horrible. After a while, I decided I just didn't have it.

Fast forward to ten years ago when I a friend invited me to come up to Vermont to take a watercolor workshop for a week. She had taken it, loved the teacher and thought I would really enjoy it.
This was my first painting. I know. It's like something a 1st grader would do. I save it just as a reminder of where I started. It was amazing how, over the course of just five days, my paintings dramatically improved. I wish I had them so show you but after moving a few times, I did finally get rid of them.
I always start by finding a scene that inspires me and then doing a quick value sketch just to decide where the lights and darks are going to be. These sketches also started out pretty shaky but have gradually gotten better with practice.

I'll sometimes do several little sketches changing where the lights and darks are until I'm excited about one of them. In the sketches above, you can see where I added more darks behind the trees which makes for a much more interesting painting. You can change these patterns of lights and darks however you want. There are no rules and you don't have to draw what's there. It's your artwork after all!

This is one of the paintings that I did from that sketch. (This one is behind glass so you're seeing a lot of reflection in the glass unfortunately.)

When I started painting at the workshops, the teacher always wanted to see our sketches before we could start painting. It was a little intimidating in the beginning but it forced to me to work on them, and it dramatically improved my paintings. And eventually I grew to love doing them.
I don't typically walk around with a sketch pad but I do take my camera with me almost everywhere I go and I take a lot of reference shots. You can use the photo to do the value sketch and once you have the sketch, you can do the painting over and over.

This is one of my favorite value sketches of a farm in Stowe, Vermont.

And this is the painting that I did from that sketch.

I have tried working directly from a photograph but I think it's better to do a sketch to work out the pattern of lights and darks. This is the harbor in Rockport, Mass. The red building in the background is often referred to as Motif #1 as it's supposedly the most photographed building in the U.S.

This the painting I made from that photograph. As you can see, I really like to simplify the scene. I'm much more interested in the shapes of things than in the details.

This is a large painting I did of a small group of daisies. Some of the petals look like lobster claws (which I don't mind) but they look like they're interacting so I'm happy with that aspect of it.

After painting watercolor for several years, I feel I made a lot of progress but I'm not in love with my work. When I look at the work of my favorite watercolors artists, I love the soupy, drippy work that looks very loose. As hard as I've tried to achieve that, I think I'm too much of a perfectionist. So I hung up the watercolor brushes and decided to pursue other things.

That's when I decided to try my hand at woodblock printing. This is a one-block printing method that I talked about in my earlier post about the Provincetown Printers. The print from this block appears at the top of the post. I think this block is even prettier than the print itself.
To do these prints, I also start with a sketch. When I took the course, there was a really bad Red Tide problem in the Northeast so this block almost started with a doodle where I was thinking about the Red Tide.
This sketch was reduced to simple line drawing of the design I wanted to transfer on to the block.

The design is transferred to a block of pine and put out using an Exacto knife. I really enjoy cutting the blocks. There's something really meditative about it.

And this is the print that I pulled off of that block. I think it would make a nice Cape Cod t-shirt.

Next I took a sculpture class at Mass. College of Art. It wasn't AT ALL what I was expecting and I have no work left from the class but if anyone is interested in such things, it's a course that changed how I see art and, perhaps, everything. The course was about the nonverbal communication of form (the shape of an object) and the materials it's made of.

As an example, let's take an apron. Might it make you think of a bygone era where gender roles were clearly established. Does it make you think of your mother? Your grandmother?

So if you were to make a sculpture in the form of an apron and you made it will tissue paper, for example, might it speak to some kind of fragility? What if it were made of small pieces of iron that are all riveted together, might it convey maternal strength?

It was fascinating stuff.

Next, I found a course in encaustic painting that really interested me. I've seen a lot of encaustic paintings that have always attracted me so I thought it would be fun to learn. Encaustic is painting with hot wax. Beeswax is melted in little tins (on a pancake griddle) and tinted with oil paint. You have to work very quickly because within seconds of taking the hot wax off the griddle, it solidifies.

Another aspect to encaustic painting is you can press objects into the wax such as leaves or paper. You can also carve it. In the painting above, you can see I've scraped a fork through the wax and pressed small pieces of copper pipe into it to make a circular cut that can then be filled with a different color wax.
While you may not like these paintings, it's forced me to work more spontaneously, reacting to what happens without my being able to plan it. It's outside of my comfort zone. In the painting above, I've drawn on, scraped off, painted on and scraped off in other parts.

This is one of later pieces that's very sculptural. I started by collaging colored pieces of paper onto the wooden block and then built up areas of wax that are very thick. I then carved patterns into the wax that allow areas of the underlying color to show through. I like this piece. It reminds me of a misty harbor scene.

I'm not sure where I go from here. The house is keeping me busy for now but I have a lot of ideas in my head and I look forward to learning and creating more.

Putting it Back Together

I've been extremely lucky as far as the weather is concerned the past week. There's something quite disconcerting about seeing the back side of your electrical outlets hanging off the outside of your house and thinking it might rain. So I didn't get a lot of sleep last night hearing about the threat of thunderstorms overnight. Thankfully there were none.

I was really happy today to come home and see that the house was insulated and almost entirely wrapped.

I think God and my house angel Jennie have been looking over me because just as they were finishing, the skies opened up.

This is the first time I've seen water standing in the garden.

And our little private alley and street are flooded.

The holes for the new front porch footings were dug yesterday. The inspector came by today and approved them--they need to be four feet deep in our area of the country--so the concrete went in the sonotubes just before the rain started.

There's just two, and sometimes three guys working on the house each day so I'm pretty happy with the progress so far.

And check this out. When they pulled the shingles off the front corner of the house where I had put my test patches of color, We found these old pieces of trim they had used for filler. The ochre color matches the clapboards that were on the house but the first coat of paint on the board is gray. So I think I'm right track with my color scheme.

Demo almost done

The demo is almost done. Every piece of sheathing has been taken off so the "insulating" lathing strips and plaster could be removed. Here's a view of the front just as they were finishing but you can still see some the house's old bones.

(Click photos to enlarge)

The garden side has been stripped all the way to the back (kitchen) door. I have to say I think there's something really beautiful about it. And I kind of like the dark color too.

The insulation should be blown in tomorrow.

The wood that was covering the sidelights was taken out and unfortunately there was nothing there....but a hole and some lavender paint.

And this is what's left of the garden bed that up against the house.

Ongoing Demo

The front stairs are totally gone. It took them an entire day to break up the old stairs.

See all the lathing strips and plaster above the door? This was put on the outside of the framing just under the sheathing as an old form of insulation. Unfortunately all of this needs to come out before insulation can be blown in.

One of the cats checking out the progress.

Meanwhile on the garden side...

This is back side of the dining room wall. Opened up and stripped of all the extra lathe and plaster. Pretty interesting contruction, huh?

The house is all post and beam construction. Here's a closeup of one of the mortised joints.

Most of the vinyl is gone. Just the upstairs deck ceiling and soffits to go.

Another view of the garden side. I kind of like the dark brown. Does this require another sangria party--I mean, color caucus?

A rare look at the back of my house and two neighbors' houses. As you can see, my back yard is about 2 1/2 feet wide.

And just a quick glamor shot of the back porch.

I was outside over the weekend just doing a little cleanup when a woman walked by and, with a look of disgust, said "Are you LIVING in there?"