A Small Victory

Let's play "Where's Sachi?" Springtime is arriving in Denver this week. That means flowers blooming, trees budding, and the snowiest month of the year...all at the same time.

It's been awhile since we've done any real work to the house. But a month or so ago I was driving down Evans and saw the grand opening sign of Blue Flame Powder Coating, and I was reminded of some posts I had read on the Eichler Network's Chatterbox Lounge. At some point I was reading about outdoor lighting, and many people recommended getting your older fixtures recoated. It's a win-win--keep your vintage fixtures, but have them look brand new.


So after one of our old fixtures went out in the kitchen (it was rotted out and smelled like those frogs you dissect in 9th grade biology, strangely), we made a little trip down to Mod-Livin to get new (old) fixtures for the bulb portion of the setup. I then took the old hardware and an exterior light fixture from the side of the house to be powder coated and then reinstalled on the front of the house. (The old light was where the old front door of the house used to be.)


I think I could have done a better job on picking the color, but it's certainly better than the bronzeish-gold color that all the fixtures had before, or the crappy old black fixture out front that has not had a glass housing since October when I broke it accidentally. It's been REALLY CLASSY looking out front the last 6 months, let me tell you. But finally, I can cross these small "to-dos" off the list. And I learned a little about doing some simple electrical work, of which I had exactly ZERO experience with before this.

As usual, this whole process took about 50x longer than I expected. I think I'm starting to learn....

Answer to Michael Regarding Fence

Michael--you didn't leave your contact info, so I can't contact you privately. To answer your question, the fence was going to be done with pine actually, upon the advice of Steve from Austin's Vintage Modern. You'll notice a house on his site that acted as partial inspiration for our fence. He did his with pine.

That said, pine was too expensive at the time, and now I'm forgetting what the alternate choice was. But it isn't anything exotic. Just go to your local lumber yard, and it's one of the most conventional options there. Definitely not cedar though. They are 1x4s and 1x2s. Some people do 1x1s, but we've heard there's lots of problems with bowing, so we bumped the size up.

Hope this helps. Feel free to email me if you have more questions!

Denver...We Have a Problem

Well, a small one. I just realized that the first pictures that we posted on the blog were not showing up for the last three or four months apparently. Sorry about that--was hosting them on another server that was no longer valid. So anyone who for some reason wants to see the 70s Grandma Chic style of our house before we moved in, you can now see the pics again.

No offense of course to anyone who is into 70s Grandma Chic. I'm sure it will be popular again soon. Brown carpet for everyone!

In other news, there have been no recent updates to the house. We're hoping to finish the den, completely redo the kitchen, and maybe do some serious landscaping. Of these, the landscaping is the most likely to happen, hopefully this spring.