Scattered Thoughts . . .

Slowly, and in between health issues and medical appointments, we are making some headway on our summer home renovation plans.   Our latest project is to paint the house. Well... to at least paint the part of the house that is mostly finished!  We plan to finish another part of the exterior this summer but we wanted to get the design and colors right first. I think we are moving in the right direction but this little exercise has pointed out the need for some minor adjustments that weren't in the original plan. This current project is going well and it involves designing, building and installing some new architectural details for the exterior which match our new renovations on the interior. Between a drastic color change and adding these architectural details, the house is beginning to show some character! In this photo, below, we can see the new lighting at our front door... The weather has been rather wet this summer so I had to set up a little workshop outdoors under

We've needed two new screen doors for a few years now. This was just one of those projects that kept getting pushed back due to other problems arising and taking precedence. In early June, I decided it was time to pick up a couple of wood screen doors... but, I couldn't find any in stock! Sheila and I finally found a couple of doors a few days ago while we were out shopping for a new refrigerator. After looking at the available refrigerators, we walked around looking at other things on our list of projects for the summer. The doors we found weren't exactly what I was looking for but I knew I could make them work.  They both were bare wood so they would need some paint. Well... since the doors take a beating, they would need a few coats of paint. Now we needed to decide on a paint color. (This project, like all of my 'little' projects, kept getting bigger and bigger.) We have plans to repaint the house so I decided this was the time to address that too. We

I've spent some time painting the doll townhouse the past few days. What I've been envisioning in my mind has been taking form in real life... and now, in color! I'm really liking this paint scheme and I think it favors the Georgetown Townhouse style I was envisioning.  The traditional yellow walls with a nice (but non-traditional) stucco texture... the clean lines of white trim... contrasting black window shutters... and a welcoming red front entry door... this is all coming together very nicely and is very reminiscent of the traditional Georgetown style. I'm actually getting excited as this homemade dollhouse comes together. The yellow exterior paint has been a major problem though... I think I now have about six or seven coats of yellow paint on this dollhouse due to some errors in choosing the correct shade of yellow. The first shade of yellow I chose was a bit dull. The second shade of yellow I chose was so bright that it had a bit of a fluorescent tint