This is part of the series, The House on High Street. The entire series is indexed here.
Here is the Kelley House in 1987 when we first lived there; the sweet-smelling Maine Auntie's rose is in the left foreground. What you can't see in this photo is that paint is flaking off everywhere.
Here is the house after the new paint job, which the whole family worked on. We scrubbed, we scraped, we brushed, we cleaned, we put on two coats of quality paint. No one fell off a ladder, although there were some close calls. I was stung on the upper lip by a yellow jacket, which the whole family thought was very funny. Our sense of humor was starting to degrade.
What you can't see in this photo is that the paint is just about to start flaking off again.
5 comments:
The house was blue first?!?! How pretty! I did like the natural colonial white though too.
Would you recommend an old house to a couple looking to buy a home? why or why not?
Well, Erikka, if you go back to the beginning of this series and read all the posts, you will begin to see a pattern. We bought the house we could afford--that meant that there were lots of repairs to be made. Once they were made, such an old place will always need more. So, we would fix one thing up, and another thing would fall down or flake or freeze or collapse or catch on fire, which would mean that more repairs were necessary.
I'd say if you have lots of money and really love antique homes, you might have a good experience. If you are skilled at plumbing and carpentry and roofing, etc. etc. etc. and don't mind spending a lot of time working on your home, ditto.
I can say this--once we moved from the Kelley House, we were amazed at all the time and money we weren't spending on our new house.
We'll always have the stories, though, and the memories of our experience there.
I think it looks much better with the white paint and dark shutters. I bet you did have a time doing all that painting yourselves.
I remember when we first started painting the house I LOVED painting it!(I had never painted anything before). That feeling was short-lived. In real life that house was very large (and it gets even bigger when you are the ones painting it. Lol)and after awhile we all got more then a little moody but I have to admit that when we were finished, I was very happy we did it. It was the first big job we had done with ALL of the family and we did sneak a lot of fun into the job. The painting of that house is now a fond memory for me because of us all working together as a family and if I was able to choose one particular time in my life I could revisit, it would be the summer we painted that house...
Beck, Dee has fond memories of painting that summer, too. Imagine!
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