| We first moved into Pine Cottage in 1999. I nick-named it "Cell Block 49" because it had all the appeal of a prison back then. You can see it in the album below as the lead photo. I think it’s always exciting to start with the "before" photo. The place was pretty awful then, with the pavement from the driveway leading directly down into the front door, so that rain that drained down into the driveway ended up right in the entryway! I love it. Can you imagine the "code" standards back when this place was built? Well, I believe there weren’t any, because this building is over 100 years old, since it was originally a "fire station" for the town of Wrights Station, which is located just down the road from our spot. Here’s the Google Maps of the ghost town of Wrights Station. | View Larger Map |
The first major improvements we made to the the cottage were to break up the concrete that lead right to the edge of the building (I did that myself with a pick-axe) and to use some left-over redwood roof shingles to add some character to the one part of the building that protruded. Chris built a box that covered the exposed power meters on the front of the building, and I covered the entire thing with shingles myself, with a little help from Chris on the tricky parts near the roof. Chris then showed Clayton and I how to use some bricks to make a walkway and edging, and I created a curved section in front of the house where we could put some plantings. You can see the finished results in Photo #2, along with the siding, paint and trim we added to the entire building to get rid of that ugly clap-board front.
After that, my mother-in-law Lora created a planter box for the front, as well as some larger planter boxes for the rest of the building. You can see the final results in Photo #3. This was taken in 2003, just before we decided to increase the size of the kitchen. Photo #4 shows a front shot of the kitchen before we added a little more space to it, and the remaining photos show more recent shots of the front of the house. You can see how the big window of the kitchen framed by my lovely clematis in Photo #5. Photo #6 shows the view from last summer, with my blue garden in all its glory. I first imagined that garden in 2003, and it’s amazing to me to see my visualization finally take shape after years of adjusting plantings and learning about layout.
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January 21st, 2008 at 6:55 pm
[…] of the adjacent dining area. (The before and after of the kitchen bump-out is on my "Curb Appeal" blog.) In a kitchen this size, 2′ represents an increase of […]