If y'all make it down to Lexington's Old Homes Tour this year, I'll be volunteering at the Krum-Timmer House on Highland Avenue. I'm looking forward to it because it's one of those houses that I've always wanted to peek inside. I'll be there all afternoon on Sunday. Incidentally, the house is for sale and you can get a teeny peek inside too by looking at the realtor's listing here. The write-up for the Krum-Timmer House on the Lexington tourism website says that the current owner bought the house sight unseen from an internet real estate listing. That's the third time in recent years that I've heard of that happening in my hometown.
While I was talking to the Tourism Director on the phone, he asked me how things are going at my house. I filled him in briefly on my current and future projects and he said, "Old Homes Tour 2015, maybe?" I said, "You bet!" That got me thinking....can I really finish my house, inside and out, by September of 2015??
The exterior's all but done, at least for now. I need to paint two windows on the east side of the house and put a second coat of paint on the porch windows. (Previously un-noticed until the Sgt. Major and I were sitting out there Tuesday afternoon and I noticed the black window trim looked a bit streaky.) After that I need to go around with a critical eye and see what else I might have missed painting. The picket fence needs staining and White Trash Bob says we should spray the stain so it's not such a time-consuming job. Come spring, I'll start some landscaping, which will evolve and never really be finished. That's one project I'm happy to work on for years and years. And with that, the exterior's complete. Unless I win the Powerball, in which case I'll buy reproduction iron roof cresting, rebuild the porch roof to mimic what it looked like originally, replace the porch posts with architectural salvage, and put imbricated shingles back on the bay roofs. Yeah, don't count on any of that.
The interior is a horse of a different color. A color closely resembling disaster. There are small projects: finish painting the second parlor, hang the last little piece of backsplash in the kitchen (which I bought two years ago and have never cut), find the perfect chandelier for the dining room, and replace the front storm door. There are medium projects: finish the wallpaper (half done) in the dining room, remove the painted-over wallpaper from the entryway and front parlor, put up picture rail in the front parlor, and paint and/or paper the entryway and front parlor.
And then there are three big projects: refinishing the floors in the whole house, renovating the bathrooms, and doing something about the back bedroom. The floor refinishing someone else will do, but it will be a big project in terms of money. The bathroom renovation will be a gigantic project that will cause a cascade of small and medium projects and no doubt cause much wailing and gnashing of teeth. It's not just fixing up the bathroom, you know—it's first deciding what to do about that tiny little hallway bathroom, then gutting the existing bathroom and replacing flooring and putting up beadboard and laying tile and installing all new fixtures and tearing out that old shower which means the porch floor and ceiling will have to be re-done and the back door can finally be moved. The back bedroom, which I have scarcely previously mentioned here because it's horrific and I pretend it doesn't exist, has a floor of scraps of plywood that don't quite fit together, 1970s-era icky paneling over the original plaster walls (which I suspect are not intact) and a dropped ceiling with acoustic tiles. Thinking about that room gives me fits.
I just re-read those last two paragraphs. Lordy be, I think I'd better get started...