Curiousity killed the front porch

This what our front porch looked like when we first bought the house. As you can see, there is a brick planter and a brown wrought iron post holding up the house. Or so we thought.

One day, Matt got curious and wanted to see what exactly was in the planter and how the wrought iron post was attached. The plan was to rebuild the planter. Well, he started digging and quickly learned that the wrought iron post was attached to ... nothing. It was buried in the topsoil. That was it.

After some discussions with the men who were working on our neighbor's much more elaborate front porch, we decided to take out the wrought iron post and replace it. Of course that meant putting in a new footing for the post. So we decided to break up the slab on the front porch (which needed to be replaced anyway) and have a new slab poured.

Once the wrought iron post and the planter were removed, this is what it looked like. Because our neighbor had a dumpster for masonry materials, we decided to break up the slab ourselves and dispose of it in the dumpster. See that yellow machine in the bottom right corner of the photo? That's the jackhammer we rented from the Home Depot. Who knew you could rent a jackhammer?

Matt quickly got the hang of the jackhammer. For better or worse, the slab broke up pretty quickly. So quick we returned it to Home Depot sooner than we thought. I did try out the jackhammer. Can't say that I was nearly as proficient as Matt.

But I did get in on the action when it came to moving stone. We actually did the job on Memorial Day (missed the races at Lime Rock for this). It was unbelievably humid. Nice workout.

And here's what it looked like when we were through. We got the area down to dirt. Under the bucket is the hole for the footing. Dug down three feet. Turns out we did a little more work than we had to. We could have left some of the gravel behind. Oh well.

Here's the final product. We had the slab poured and the column installed. I painted the column. It definitely gives the house a more modern look. Not that there's anything wrong with wrought iron....

Final product

And here's how it came out...

We're pretty pleased with how it came out. We love the colors! You never know what it's going to look like until you get the color on the wall. A definite improvement from the floral wallpaper that was there when we moved in. We still have some touch up work to do, and the trim needs to get finished.

And yes, painting left me very sleepy!

New coat of paint

Just an update on what we're been up to this weekend. Yup, we've been sanding and painting the living room and dining room. But we did have enough time to take a minute and pose for this one -- Matt likes to call it Garwood Gothic.

Special thanks to Barry for coming over today to help us out. We got a lot more done today than we expected thank to him! By the end of the day, everything was sanded, the ceiling was painted, and there was primer on all the walls!

Sanding came first. Thanks to the magic of photography, I look like I'm sanding faster than I really was.

We did have to remind Matt that the paint goes on the wall and not on his face.

We're excited to get actual color on the wall tomorrow! We've had the paint colors selected for almost a year. Keep checking in on the blog for updates.