Life

Over the past couple of years, the kids have gone off to college. As a result, most of the time it's just the two of us and the Guardians of the Garden bumping around in the house. We've had the "cocoa puff" for a while. We rescued the "cream puff" in the fall. I guess you could say he is our pandemic "pup", even though he's over two years old..

We'd been thinking for a while about downsizing. We had a particular new development in mind and the timeline seemed to fit what we had in mind, but it turned out to not be the right fit for a number of reasons.

So we switched gears and started thinking abut other options. In the process of exploring the new idea, some interesting properties popped up and we looked at them to get a feel for things. They sold quickly which was OK, because we still had the longer timeline in mind. And we learned enough to confirm the new direction as a possibility when the time came.

Then, out of the blue, we heard about a place that would soon be coming up for sale. We went and saw it and bought it before it even went public.

As of today, Farrington is on the market.

The Southern Wall

 Over the past couple of years, we've slowly been tackling the brick work.

Mostly that's just been tuckpointing. The plan was to do on side of the house at a time to manage costs.

This year was the south-facing wall.

It required more than just tuckpointing though. The brick columns between the original kitchen windows in the basement supported the entire south wall at the back of the house. It was time to give them some help.

The help came in the form of some steel support columns which are installed behind the brick columns.

They hold up the new steel support beam which holds up the rest of the wall. The window headers are now purely decorative because the steel is doing all the work.

The Front Door

 The back door was practice for the front door.

I didn't have time last fall to refinish the front door before it got cold. Once it got warm enough this spring I started the prep work.

Scope included the outside of the door, both sides of the screen door, the side lights, and the sunburst/transom.

It took quite a bit of time to strip the old gummy varnish and gently sand things down by hand to good wood without damaging any of the detail.

Then multiple coats of varnish until I achieved the desired result. Many days passed between coats waiting for the right weather conditions, but it's finally done.

As with the back door, the front door got new bronze screen.