Monday, September 12, 2011

Wash it. PLEASE!

Happy Monday morning to you! .... OK, how about tolerable Monday morning to you. Sorry, I didn't mean to be one of those chipper, upbeat Monday people. I know how that needles some of you.

I have some very important words of wisdom for you. Look out, here they come:

Things look better when they are CLEAN.

Wow, profound huh? I can hear you saying "Oh wise Heather, share some more wisdom with us." "Oh sage Heather, do speak further nuggets of profundity to us." Right, what I can actually here you thinking is "Duh Heather, remind me why am I reading this?"

Here's the thing, the state of our house is so overwhelming and so horrible and requires so much work that I forget that there are some simple solutions that can help tide us over until we get to a project scheduled for much later. Cleaning is one of those things. Every time I drive up to our house I'm embarrassed by the way it looks. I apologize to our neighbors all the time. The problem is that the outside isn't a priority yet. We still have TONS to do inside. (More on that tomorrow.) The contradictory problem to that problem is that the disgusting state of the outside has been weighing on us.

Here is is:


Our icky, weedy, dirty, ugly, pathetic, little house.

We have plans to change everything about it. One day it will have a 8' x 8' entryway off the front, a new roof, new windows, landscaping, trim and siding. It will look completely different but that is a long way off.

The one thing we can do is clean it up. So we gathered Simple Green, a long-handled scrub brush, a bucket and a hose and started scrubbing. We also gathered a rake and pruning shears to get rid of the weeds along the foundation.

Oh boy, it was BAD! I don't think this house had been cleaned in thirty years.


Above is a sample of what all of the siding looked like. It was green mildew, I guess. The front of the house doesn't get much sun.


The left of the blue line has had a first scrub, the right of the line is untouched. Nice screen huh? 


Apparently the damp, mildew-y conditions were to the liking of this frog. He was behind a shutter.


Again, you can see some of the progress. The left, while not finished, is much better than the right. So icky.


Here it is, still in progress. I removed most of the weeds from the front of the house. I quit after a while because I kept finding so many spiders that I felt like things were crawling on me. I can only take so much adrenaline in one day. The two oil pipes are going to be removed and the red lines point to some of the thirty years of junk that the former owner had tossed into weeds. One day I'll show you the "treasures" we pulled from the back yard. It is truly amazing.

Here is the house this morning, all washed and clean (at least the front is.)


Our icky, weedy, dirty, ugly, pathetic, little house is now less dirty and less weedy. There is still so much to do but getting it clean was a good start. Our neighbors keep assuring us that they are really excited that the lawn is getting mowed and the police aren't here and that no one living here is dating someone from prison. While we are exceedingly grateful to the former resident for setting the bar so low that ANY improvement is met with high praise, we won't be done until it's actually cute, inside and out. 

Tomorrow I'll be sharing lists of what we need to do A'la Young House Love. Unlike YHL, ours will make your head explode.

See you then,
H

2 comments:

  1. Wow, you did so much to it with the washing, weeding, and mowing, that somehow it made your house not only look clean and tidy, it somehow made the sun shine and the whole thing come into focus!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you! I thought it looked too pristine so I spray painted something on the lawn. ;-p

    ReplyDelete

Welcome! I'd love to hear from you so please comment, it would make my day!

Note: Home Again Jog is a troll-free zone, nasty comments won't be published, period.