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Showing posts from May, 2011

Rain Barrels and Chains

The most recent addition to our home: rain barrels and copper rain chains. A couple months ago, we had new seamless gutters installed to replace the plastic do-it-yourself gutters the previous owner had installed. We asked the installers to adapt them to fit rain chains, and installed our copper rain chains a couple weeks later. Before: You can see the many seams that the old gutters had. They all leaked! After: This is the front of the house, but you can see... NO seams! :) The next step was to find a rain barrel to catch the water at the bottom of the rain chains. We shopped online and found out that it would be a lot cheaper to make our own custom rain barrel than to buy one. We called around to wineries and found out that they were only charging $30/full wine barrel!! We bought three wine barrels and cut one in half to use at the base of both of the barrels. This helped get them high enough so that our watering can would fit under the spigot. Here are the rain chains befo

Old House Pictures

I had the chance several months ago to meet up with the second owner's children. Their parents purchased the home in 1928, and lived in it until the late 60's. They were great and were able to find several pictures of the house when they lived in it. These pictures are my motivation to bring this house back to what it used to be. This is a picture of the parlor. It is to the right immediately when you walk in the front door. This picture is in the dining room during Thanksgiving. You can see a lot of the woodwork that we have spent hours stripping paint from. The windows behind the man at the end of the table have not been stripped yet. This is a photo of the backyard during winter. The fence that is in this picture was (mostly) still standing when we purchased the house. We put up a new fence this winter for more privacy and security. This is a picture of the owner's daughter reading on the screened in front porch. They used to sleep out there in the summer. The

Uneventful

Life around the BoisBungalow has been pretty uneventful as of late. We have been working on the yard (weeds, garden beds, planting perennials etc) and are halfway done with staining the fence. Our next goal is to build a picket fence in the front yard to double the space for the dogs to run around in. I am really excited for this project because it is something that I think will definitely make the front yard a more usable space for both us and our pups. We also plan on building garden beds all around the inside of the fence, so this will create more garden space. This fence will also keep the stray dogs out of our yard and make it safer for our cats who enjoy basking in the grass. We plan on getting a new mailbox to put out by the sidewalk so the postman doesn't have to walk up the steps to get to our box. I will update with pictures in my next post :)