We've taken a break on home improvements after the
Housewarming Party and decided to focus on the holiday season instead. But that doesn't mean we could ignore standard cold-weather preparations. And so today we tackled the leaves...
We raked the front yard once shortly before our party, but had deliberately ignored the back--which no one can see from the street--until most of the leaves fell. By late November, "fall" was over. D used the blower while I raked (I wanted too--I needed a post-Thanksgiving work-out). We filled 5 tarps-worth of leaves, which we dragged to the front curb. Fortunately, our neighborhood has curbside pick-up that runs on a cycle, so we don't even have to bag the leaves. There are still a lot of leaves in the back but we made a nice dent in it. We also re-raked the front yard. I'm sure I will be sore tomorrow.
We also finally got around to shutting our outdoor faucets. It took a while to find the right knobs, since we completely forgot that kind of useful information we got during our home inspection. But we figured it out, and have the outdoor faucets open with the indoor part shut down. As soon as we find them in the garage, we will also dress the faucets with the cute little booties my parents gave us.
What didn't we do? Well, we have some unfinished wood on our back steps that we planned to weatherproof.
The problem, which we just noticed today, is that Thompson's Water Seal requires a few days of dry, warm weather. The instructions state that 2 days of above 50-degree weather is necessary. We may have missed the boat on this one. Hopefully the wood won't take too much of a beating this winter and we can take care of it in the spring.
Another thing we didn't get to, but that is on our fall prep list, is fixing our window sills. The front bay window was already on our list of to-do's:
Then D's dad noticed that we have some rotting outside our upstairs windows, and that we should treat it before it rots too deeply. The upstairs bedroom window is much worse than the bay window. It's practically hollow in there:
We need to buy some wood filler and exterior primer and paint. By default, we tend to go to Sherwin Williams; but I think this job doesn't require a particularly nice paint, so we'll probably just go to Home Depot. Paint recommendations are welcome. We're also considering just replacing the upstairs windows, which are original to the house and do not have storm or screen windows. If we do that, the sill will get replaced too. Alternately, we could just install storm/screen windows to the existing structure, which means that we will still have to fix the sill (that could be a tongue-twister). We're still doing research and it's all pretty expensive, so we'll probably just stop the rot and deal with the bigger issues later.
2 comments:
Aha! My years of exterior painting/trouble-shooting might actually come in handy here! From the picture, your deck looks like it'll make it through the winter just fine. You might want to (carefully) powerwash it before coating in the spring/early summer, that should brighten your horizontal wood.
For the sill, depending on the window construction, it may be easy to just replace it with a new piece of wood. Though I would disagree on the choice of cheaper paint here, SW Duration you mentioned using inside the house, in its exterior satin version, would be perfect to protect sills and windows. It's also a primer-paint in one, so you can use it on bare wood. And it's a pleasure to work with, almost twice as thick as regular paint!
Good luck :)
Thanks Zhenka! Fortunately we're avoiding some of the work by throwing money at the problem and replacing the upstairs windows, which includes repairs and capping of the wood sills. We'll still have to fix the picture window ourselves though, and will take your advice.
~J
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