The Forever Cottage Inspo: The Exterior

Before

This last weekend was a busy one for working on the house. Well, it's always busy I guess, but it's been a while since I actually worked long and hard on something myself, Dane's been doing most of the work lately. But he needed help putting up fascia board (the edge board you see that covers the end of the joists) and I started paint prep!

We get so much rain here in southern Oregon, I wanted to get the exterior painted before it really gets going. Usually it hits in October sometime, so we're kind of racing to get the roofing done and most of the exterior before that happens. It's still showing clear for the 10 day forecast though, so fingers crossed it will stay nice weather for a while!

There isn't really much I need to do to the new part of the house as far as prep before painting (although there will be a ton of caulking at some point soon), but the original part of the house really needed some attention before I could do any painting. It's obvious it hadn't been painted in a really long time, maybe over 20 years! And most of it was peeling and flaking off.

To get a good adhesion with the new paint, I had to get all of the loose stuff off, which required going over it with a pressure washer, going over it all by hand and scraping it, and then pressure washing one more time! It was as much work as it sounds. It took me three days!

Now that it's done though, it looks so much cleaner without all the flaky paint and cobwebs, in spite of all the missing paint, haha! And now I have a smooth slate for priming and painting. I wrapped that up today, and here's what it looks like now.




The plan is to start painting this week, and since I will definitely be sharing an update when that's done, I thought I'd show you some of my inspiration for it!

source
source
source
source
source
source
I had a really hard time deciding on a color for the house, because I actually really loved the green it was originally, and I also love super dark colored houses. But when it came down to it, I decided to go with white, since I've been wanting a white house for years! I figured I'd regret it if I didn't do it.

We're also doing a gabled front entry, that will be enclosed on the sides and only open on the front. Our house is far from a Tudor style house, but I kept coming back to them for their front entries and so I took inspiration from them for ours. It's not built yet, but it will be done soon!

And lastly, I know we're doing a wood front door, and I got some brick on craigslist for our front steps and walkway.

It's going to be so exciting seeing the outside come together, and it's a pretty big check off the list. Soon, we'll be moving onto the interior, and man am I ready for that!

So what do you think? I know white houses are very trendy right now, but I just love them so much! Are you on the white house bandwagon too? What are some of your favorite exterior details?

Have a great rest of your day, and thanks for stopping by!
SaveSave
SaveSave

The Forever Cottage: Demo and Where We Are Currently

Before
Today I thought I'd bring everything up to date on our progress with our new home. It seems crazy that we've already lived here for almost four months! But while it seems like it's been slow going, a lot has actually been accomplished. But, first we had to come across some major changes to the plans. So here are some progress pictures of what we've done so far.




Right off the bat after we moved onto the property, we started on demo. Things were going along pretty well, and most of the stuff we came across was pretty much expected. There was wood panelling in every room, and cardboard ceiling tiles, and it all had to come down. We found lots of bug nests in the walls and ceilings, which is what all of that grey dirt looking stuff is! We knew whole place needed re-wiring and new plumbing, and while trying to maybe salvage the kitchen, it became obvious pretty quickly that we would need to get all new cabinetry (which was fine by me!).






One fun thing we came across that we weren't expecting were the stacked 2x4 walls! I guess that's pretty common with older houses in timber products areas, because of all of the lumber mills. Mill workers could get free scraps and seconds, but they were so short that the only way to use them in building was to stack and nail them, one on top of the other! All in all, it wouldn't have been too bad to keep that, and we were planning on keeping some exposed as a statement wall.





We had the place pretty much completely gutted in a few weeks, and since so much of what we were tearing out was wood based products, we just chucked them out of the living room window and eventually got it all burned before fire season started in our area. The pile was huge! It was pretty validating to see that proof of what we were accomplishing.







Then we got to the foundation. Like I said in my last post, we knew it was bad. We just weren't sure how bad. When we figured it out, after the house was almost completely gutted, we knew it needed a new one. It became a matter of either jacking the house up and pouring a new foundation, or tearing the older, original half (built in the 40s) down and starting from scratch there.

What it came down to was the fact that besides the roof (which was still in great shape, and only about 10 years old), we were literally replacing everything of value in that part of the house. The stacked walls were ok, but they weren't really worth salvaging or trying to work around. So when it came down to it, we decided to tear the front down and start fresh, with a new foundation and traditionally framed walls.



So, down she came. My father-in-law is an excavator, and he brought his equipment over and went to work! There was a quick, scary moment when the house started twisting away, and almost hit our trailer! I was live streaming on instagram stories, so if you tuned in, you got to see us all collectively almost have a heart attack, haha.

But, my father-in-law's a pro and he got a hold of it at the last second, and it came down without any more drama :) It was a very exciting day, especially after weeks of slow going, then BOOM! Big progress!





The front came down about a month ago, and we just finished up our new foundation. Things seemed to drag on for a while waiting on our permits, but now we're finally on a roll. My parents were here a couple of weeks ago, and my dad helped cut down and remove a couple of trees that were planted awkwardly close to the house. And then we had both of our dads and a couple of friends come help pour our foundation footing. Then came the block (that my f-i-l also helped with), and it's slowly but surely been moving along.






The next step is framing and rough plumbing. It's just so exciting to be in the process of building it back up instead of tearing things apart! The updates will probably be a little slower coming at this point, because now we're caught up, but in the meantime I'll be sharing some inspiration and plans for the design that I've been coming up with over the last few months. My goal is to be better about sharing things during this renovation in real time than with our last one, haha!

Thanks for stopping by!

The Forever Cottage: Where We Started

Before

In my last update on our new home, I shared some of the exterior photos of the house and the surrounding property. Today I thought I'd share the interior before pictures, fresh from when we first looked at it. As a warning, these pictures are very raw and not pretty at all. This is what a screaming real estate deal looks like in our area!


Entering the house, you walk into the dining room and kitchen from the front door, which is so British. Check out Escape to the Country on Netflix if you don't know what I'm referring to, haha!



Off of that is the spare room and laundry, which at one point were separate rooms but had been opened up into one. We knew that we would be putting that wall back up and separating the two.



Through the kitchen was a big selling point, and that was the large living room. Large for the house anyway, and large enough to have friends and family over. It also had nice big windows with a great view of the back property! Obviously, when I took these, the owners still hadn't removed all of the stuff, so it seems a little smaller than it really is in these pictures.





Off the hall is the bathroom, and what will be the master bedroom. Not big by any means, but we've had tiny bedrooms and we've had huge bedrooms (our Idaho house had a massive master suite!) and this seemed like a good size for us.

There is also a deck off of the living room, and while it's not the worst, it needs a fair amount of work, like everything else.



We knew going in that this place needed so much tlc (aka, a complete gut job!) and we knew that we were going to be running into some electrical and foundation issues with it. Just so you know that we had no illusions this was going to be an easy job! We were working with an original half of the house that was built in the 40s, and that had been added onto in the 60s.

Plus, whoever built it initially had to have been pretty small. The ceilings were only 6'11"! Now, we aren't the tallest people, so it wasn't all that bad to us, but we knew that raising the ceilings was going to be on the list, at least for part of the house.



On top of that, it was very, very dirty and hadn't been maintained very well at all. The owner who did the addition lived (and smoked inside!) for the last 50 years, and there had been some animals in and out of the place in the last decade. Mmmm, smell that??.....

But the bones seemed good (and in parts of it they were), it was cute, and overall it checked most of the boxes we were looking for.

Then we started demo. But I'll get to that later :) We ended up having to make some pretty major changes to the plan after we really got into it, so I figured it warranted it's own post, and that will bring us up to it's current stage. So stay tuned for that!

Thanks for stopping by :)
SaveSave

Popular Posts

Like us on Facebook

Brightly Done

Pinterest