New doors...

One part of our painting project is to replace a damaged door. It isn't a door we use, but it is drafty and completely unpaintable. And since this whole project leads to painting the house and all the outbuildings, a new door was required.



The reason we don't use the door is obvious when you see it, but there is a backstory. Before we bought this place back in the 80's, the driveway came straight off the county road and up through the front pasture, leading to the front door. But after the surrounding farmland was subdivided into 2+ acre lots, a new private road was built on the opposite side of the house, so it made sense to start using the old kitchen door as the main entrance.

We made matters worse when we moved in, and discovered that a wrap-around porch was mostly rotten. One of the previous owners had built it using tongue-in-groove boards, and one day I came home from work to find DW in the middle of tearing it down, one board at a time. We ended up building a much smaller deck off the kitchen door, and with no deck leading to the old front door, it became unusable.

But the door still needed to be replaced. So one morning we set off to the door store in SoDo, and in five minutes flat we found the perfect door for our Craftsman farmhouse. So perfect, in fact, that we bought two of them, deciding to replaced our perfectly OK front door. It helped that the doors were fiberglass (which our painter recommended), and were half price because the leaded glass windows were set in crooked (which turned out to be a pretty easy thing to fix).

So I now have beautiful Shaker doors with leaded glass windows that bring light into the house. From the inside, I can look out to the patio and the gardens. And from the outside, the reflection of the trees is beautiful. I will have to wait until the end of the project to see them painted, and can hardly wait.

Porches...

Next week, our contractor/painter starts work on our nearly 100-year-old farmhouse. I am beyond excited!

The house should have been painted a decade ago, I will freely admit. But as excited as I am about painting our house and farm buildings, I am just as excited about the carpentry work that John will do: replacing broken siding, adding battens to the barn and chicken coop, and tearing cedar siding off the garage in the gable ends, and replacing it with cedar shingles. Once that's done, John will start painting.

Dave and I spent a whole day running around the Enumclaw Plateau, home to barns and farmhouses and historic home neighborhoods, armed with paint chips. We were most worried about finding the perfect barn red, but we nailed that one quickly. The barn, pump house, and chicken coop will all be painted red, as farm buildings should be. The three greys for the house and garage were a bit more difficult to nail down, but I think we found just what we were looking for.

Along the path to paint colors, we decided to replace doors. The back door (formerly the front door; long story) definitely needs to be replaced; it's delaminating and can't be fixed. And it also needs a porch to be usable, unless you're really tall and don't need steps to reach a door that's 6 feet off the ground. Another long story, which I guess I should tell one of these days!



I made a second trip through Enumclaw today... and I found the perfect porch and porch roof for a country Craftsman farmhouse. The porch isn't on the work list for this project, but maybe this winter, John will build it for us. (I also love the picket fence and the foundation shrubs.)

Isn't this one cool? I love the chandelier!

Favorite farmhouses...

A couple of weeks ago, I posted photos of one of my favorite farmhouses. The pictures were from years ago, and for some reason I was thinking about the house this morning. So, even though it was raining (still), I decided to head that direction. I've only driven past when there were leaves on the trees, and wondered if I could get better pictures today.

The house is smaller than my own farmhouse, but I love the one-story room they added to one side. It's something I always wished we could do with our own farmhouse, but it wouldn't have worked for us.



I also love their barn, which I've never had a clear view of before. Today I was brave and walked up the gravel drive to the barn and outbuildings, and shot a few quick pictures to add to my collection of barn photographs.

Whidbey Island barns...

A couple of weeks ago, DW and I spent the weekend on Whidbey Island, camping out with the family on our niece's wooded 5 acres. I heard the wind blow during the night, and raindrops fall on our tent, so I didn't have much hope for an early morning photo tour of the island. But when I got up and dressed and zipped the tent behind me, it was dewey but not wet. So I grabbed my camera and keys and quietly slipped off to explore as the sun came up.



Just around the corner from my niece's little cabin in the woods, I found this old farmstead with red barn, chicken coop, tractor shed, and farmhouse, all with white trim. And a perfect view east toward the rising sun, with clouds reflecting in the pond.



I lingered for half an hour, hoping for the sunrise to bring color to the sky, but it never happened. Just the bright morning light behind the clouds, as the night brightened into day.

Linking up today on the Barn Collective.

Paint...

    E. R. Rogers house, Steilacoom

This is the year to paint our 1923 farmhouse, and everywhere I go I look for paint colors on historic homes. I know the perfect combination is out there: house, window trim, and accent color.

Our little farmhouse is shingled from top to bottom, and has wide trim boards and molding, and wide boards frame the double-hung windows.

In Tacoma and Steilacoom, we saw many homes with our architecture, painted in a soft sage green with white or cream trim. One had dark rust for the accent color (and front door), one had dark mulberry, and one had dark green.

I really liked the mulberry.

This beautiful house was built in 1891 and has been a private home, a boarding house, a restaurant, and is currently a law office. It's been completely restored, and stands along the waterfront with views of the Anderson Island ferry, the south sound islands, and the Olympic mountains.

Old doors...

There's an old door in the barn that I'd love to refinish and use in the farmhouse. It was painted an ugly flat brown, and the paint is peeling. Near as I can tell from the old layers of paint, the house was never cream or brown, never a color that would go with a dark brown door. It's a mystery. The door is beautiful, with a solid wood panel in the lower third of the door, and the upper two-thirds of the door has 12 small panes of glass. I've always thought it would make the perfect door for our bedroom, or for the main floor bathroom. Or maybe we could cut it down for the wine cellar door. It must have come out of the house, removed for something more modern, but carefully set aside in case it was ever needed.

The upper floor in our old farmhouse still has the original doors, and they all match. These doors are simple single panel doors, and they have the original hardware: oversized hollow brass doorknobs. So this multi-light door didn't come from the upstairs.

The downstairs was "modernized" in the late 1960s, and the interior doors are now simple hollow-core doors. I suspect the main floor doors once matched the ones upstairs, but unfortunately, the owner didn't save the doors or the hardware.

This fancy door could have been the original front door, but I don't think I'd use it for that. It wouldn't be a very secure main entry door, not with all the glass.

The doors are a mystery, lost, just like the original floorplan of the house.

Farmhouse bathroom...

After way too many months of ignoring the bathroom remodel, and having way too much fun traveling, this week we're focused on our new farmhouse bathroom. And on the cat search. These are two things I can do at the same time.

Dave added another GFI outlet at my end of the counter, and today I painted the ceiling and walls. I'll paint the medicine cabinet tomorrow. We found the perfect vanity light fixture, with ultra-bright LEDs. The double towel bar is up, and I picked out a white shelf/towel bar to hang over the toilet. 

Next up is to paint all the trim boards: baseboard, door trim, shoe molding, and plywood beadboard panels. I'm going to make a blind for the window, maybe two of them so I can change when I'm in the mood for different colors.

This is the beauty of an all-white bathroom:  the color will come from towels and flowers and things that are easy to change.

Like maybe the gorgeous periwinkle blue of my favorite hydrangea.

Will it ever cool down?

We had a frustrating day, hunting for materials for our bathroom remodel. It was hot and tiring and at the end of the day, all we had to show for it was some some decisions. But that's something, I guess.

We headed for the Irish Pub in town, which we'd always intended to try. But when we walked up to the door, we found only a sign: "We've closed our doors, thanks for your business." Grrr...

So we ended up at the Airways Brewery for appetizers and icy cold beer. It was just what we needed.

Something new...

There's something new in our little farmhouse, something we've not had since leaving our "modern" house in West Richland 30 years ago:  a bathroom fan that didn't have to be plugged in and take up two feet of counter space.

Every update to a nearly century-old farmhouse is a challenge, but our bathroom remodel has been much more complicated than it should have been. This is partly because the original remodel, back in the late 1960s, was not well executed (or conceived). The bathroom straddles what was once the original bathroom and a hallway (we think) that ran between the original dining room (our current bedroom) and the kitchen. We figured this out when we tore out the vinyl flooring and found the remains of an interior wall.

We thought this would only affect how we installed new flooring, but no. Turns out that instead of replacing the original plaster ceiling and leaving the high ceiling intact, and bringing the plumbing up from the basement, they added a false ceiling to hide remnants of the old wall conceal the plumbing. So adding a simple bathroom vent was a bit complicated. We had to tear up floorboards in the attic to expose the old ceiling, run wiring from the hallway, and chisel out (using the modern equivalent of a Saws-All) a small U-shaped gap in the false ceiling joists for the vent pipe to run through.

The outside vent screen went in last weekend, and today Dave installed the lighted fan and ran the flexible vent pipe. Then it was time for a test shower. No steam fogging our mirror or window... success!

Farmhouse style

My love of farmhouses goes back to a very young age, when I was crazy in love with horses. Being only four or so, I was convinced that in order to have a horse, you needed to live in one of these houses, surrounded by acres of green pastures. I had yet to learn that people in cities had horses, too... they just kept them in other people's stables, and lived where they pleased.

Driving the back roads, looking for farmhouses, has always been one of my favorite things to do. And once I learned that Craftsman style houses are close relatives of the more humble country farmhouse, I started to explore the older neighborhoods of the towns and cities we visited, looking for perfect examples of the things I love in a house. Gables, dormers, double-hung windows, decorated eaves, stained glass, and shake siding.

They come in all shapes and sizes, one story or one-and-a-half story or two story. Some have simple entryway porches, and some have porches that wrap around the whole house, with room for wicker chairs or a porch swing. There are half-moon attic windows and leaded glass windows, double-hung windows or bay windows with window seats. Some have shingled exteriors, some have both shingles and narrow cedar siding. And there's even the occasional farmhouse rendered in brick.

My favorites are still those that are surrounded by pastures full of horses. Some things don't ever change. But I'm also glad to find farmhouses that have survived the loss of their acreage, houses that still shelter someone who loves farmhouse style.

I found my own farmhouse, too... but that's another story.

Toilet in a box

I've seen some interesting packing jobs in my life, but this was a hoot. It bears a bit of explanation: We live in an 89-year-old farmhouse in the middle of five acres of pastures and woods in a narrow valley. We've been there for 26 years now, and have never stopped loving it.

But buying an old farmhouse is not without challenges. Having fixtures wear out is part of owning a home, but when the upstairs bathroom toilet tank sprung a leak, we were stymied. You just can't go out and buy a replacement tank for a wall-hung toilet. So we did some online searching, and learned that our toilet was made in the early 1970s, and that we could buy a new tank for $600-700. Just the tank, without a lid.

Really? I don't think so.

More searching brought us to a guy who refurbishes fixtures from old houses and resells them. He had two used tanks with minor blemishes that would fit our toilet, for $80. Sold!

The tank arrived yesterday morning, right on schedule. When Dave lugged the box in from the front porch, we both started laughing. The seller promised it would arrive unbroken... I guess packing it in a box marked "Eggs" would just about ensure that!

I have to wonder what the UPS guy thought, as he lugged a 40 pound box of eggs to our front door.

A painterly outlook

Even though I’ve not put paint to paper yet, my usual research approach to any new subject is paying off already. I’ve read a couple dozen books on watercolor painting, especially landscapes and architecture, and am seeing the world in a different way. As a photographer, I love to take wide views, but also like close-ups of features: farmhouses in their landscape, but also doors, millwork features, windows, etc. And those are useful for references when painting. I usually try to crop out things that aren’t attractive, but for painting, I don’t need to do this. It’s better to get the scene right for a composition, and just don’t include the ugly powerlines or jumble of houses.

The last weekend we spent at the cabin, we took one of our favorite drives, up the canal to Seabeck. As always, I rode with my camera on my lap. There was something about the overcast sky but fairly bright light that made everything so photogenic. I took a few pictures of the cool community center at Holly, just snapshots out the window. These will be good reference pictures. Dave spotted a string of new caches on the Holly Road, one of our favorite little side roads anyway, so we took a detour to go find them. The first was next to an inlet with overhanging trees; the color of the water next to the green trees and bright shore was beautiful, and I took quite a few photos there.

I’ve gotten in the habit of looking at the world through the lens, and choosing my shots that way. That’s how I found my favorite picture of the day: looking west toward the canal through overhanging trees, with misty clouds hiding the Olympics.

The day steadily got more gloomy and rainy, but I still stopped to photograph one of my favorite farmhouses. It's at the turn to the state park, surrounded by grass and trees, at what was once the end of Seabeck Bay. And although you should take architectural pictures on sunny days (because buildings benefit from stronger contrast), I love this view of one of my very favorite farmhouses. This house sat rather forlorn in an open field for years, now it has a fresh coat of paint, and beautiful gardens. This place has the sort of plantings I’d like to have at our farmhouse, including the foundation plantings.
I especially love the curved edging of rock that turns into a dry stone wall, separating the gravel drive from the gardens, the granite boulders that add interest to the border, and the rich colors of the sedum and chrysanthemums.

Books for a country farmhouse (or cabin)

My day-to-day life always seems to include researching something. Sometimes it’s because I want to learn more; sometimes I’m looking for ideas to use in my own life (or house or cabin). This list was made because of my plans to work on the interior design of our cabin, and is a blend of Cottage, Lodge, and Adirondack style.

Our county-wide library system (which in 2011 was declared to be the busiest & the biggest in the country), is an amazing resource for just about anything you want to research. With a little help from the Amazon "look inside" feature, I narrowed my list to these titles, and reserved them from the library. A few, like the Arts & Crafts Cabin, I've read before. This time I may add a couple of titles to the home library.

• Aged To Perfection: Adding Rustic Charm To Your Modern Home… (Linsley)
• Arts & Crafts Cabin (Obomsawin)
• Cabin Fever: Rustic Style Comes Home (Carley)
• The Cabin: Inspiration for the Classic American Getaway (Mulfinger)
• Cabinology: A Handbook To Your Private Hideaway (Mulfinger)
• Cottage: America’s Favorite Home Inside and Out (Connolly)
• Cottage Style: Ideas & Projects For Your World (Farris)
• Cottages: The New Style (Trulove)
• Easy Cottage Style: Comfortable Interiors For Country Living (Bauwens)
• Farmhouse Book: Tradition, Style, and Experience (Larkin)
• Found Style: Vintage Ideas For Modern Living (Butler)
• New Cottage Style: Decorating Ideas For Casual, Comfortable, Living
• New Country Style (Grigg)
• Rustic Revisited: Innovative Design For Cabin, Camp, and Lodge (O’leary)
• Shortcuts To Decorating Country Style (Atkins)

I spent a couple of weeks going through this big stack of books, enjoying the eclectic mix of styles, and seeing how others have incorporated country elements into both old and modern homes and cabins. When I was through, I bought Arts & Crafts Cabin and Cottage Style. But there are a couple of others that I'll add to the library, when we're ready to tackle some bigger remodeling jobs (one day), or when it's time to build our retirement home.