Spring renewal: The front steps

It's starting to be time for spring renewal around our house and one of the first projects that came to mind were the front steps. Wow, we were looking a little derelict, if I must say so. I guess it had been at least ten years since the steps were painted and it showed!


Here they are just after we started to work on them, so even though we had started to scrape the bottom step, they honestly didn't look much better than this. Poor babies!

We scraped and sanded and scraped and sanded. One of the steps is concrete, the other two are wood, and the sides are stucco. We also did some repair on the stucco. By the end of the first day we had finished the prep and had primed the whole thing white. That white really stood out - I can't say it looked 100% better than the derelict look, but we were making necessary progress. We quit for the day.

The next day we painted, and when we were nearly done we realized we had the wrong color. It was red, as the steps had been before and as the trim on our house is, but it was really really red. I'm saying it didn't match any of the other reds, sigh. The other can of red paint, which did say porch and floor on it, was too old to use. It had gotten all gummy. I went down to the local Ace Hardware and got another can of that, the Porch and Floor, in Tile Red.

Bingo! It was the right color and an extra coat of paint never hurt anything. Especially since we got it done and dried before the next rain! Here they are  - aren't they gorgeous?

Only problem is, now the porch obviously needs paint too. Well, that's the way with house projects. One leads to another.

P.S. Those are cauliflower plants alongside the steps, and they each have a baby cauliflower down in the middle of the leaves. Yum!

The hutch: New life for an old project

I've been working on my hutch for years, trying to get it back to its original finish - the one that matched all the beautiful dark wood in the house when it was built in 1917.  I finished stripping the paint off the windows above the built-in just in time for my son's wedding. . . in 2000. Yikes, that was almost 14 years ago.

Over the years, I've done a bit more here and there. Last week I picked up the project again after a long time of no action. I sanded the paint off one more drawer and replaced the drawer pull. Here's how it looks now on the left. You can see the drawer I just did - it's the large one on the bottom.

This thing sits in the middle of my dining room, and I can't believe it's taken me this long to do. After all I use it as a bar and display center for some of my dishes, and I guess I've looked at its unfinished state so long I hardly notice it. That's all changed. I'm still far from finished, but I have a new commitment. I WILL get it done this year.

So far, most of the work has been done with stripper. I tried the humane, not-dangerous-for-humans, green kind and it just didn't work on this paint. There are at least three layers, the bottom two part of an attempt at "antiquing" the hutch. They are dark gray and couldn't have been attractive even when they were new. Anyway, those two layers are gummy, and nothing gets through them stripper-wise except the really strong stuff. So I have to wear a ventilator mask to use it in the house, although I did the first part, the windows, without it. Hopefully I won't come up with some dread disease. The ventilator mask is a pain in the neck, and I really dislike it but oh well. Have to do it.

The drawers I did with a small sander, and of course I took them outside to sand. I'll do the same for the cabinet doors on either side of the drawers. I'm not sure yet what I'll do for the glass doors, but the remaining painted parts of the frame will have to be stripped in place with the stripper. And the mask.

When I finish stripping, I'll stain the whole thing and finally brush a couple of layers of shellac on it. That's how all the rest of the wood in the house is finished, and the trick will be to match it as closely as I can. Fortunately, none of the already stained and shellacked wood butts right up against the hutch, so 'close to the same' will be just fine.

I never thought it would take this long, but when I'm done it'll be a thing of beauty. Can't wait!