Frilly Bits

I last left you with this shot of our poor little ugly duckling house still looking as ugly as ever.

Well I've been getting very sick of walking up those front steps and shaking my head at the ugliness of it all, so stay tuned for some serious changes around here!

First up? What I'm calling 'the frilly bits'. The little decorative bits and pieces that transform the front of house from boring and plain to attractive.

When we first bought this house, it had these lattice-ey frilly bits underneath its front section. Not exactly amazing, but better than nothing.

And in my imaginings about what this house would eventually look like, I've always thought we would do something like this.

Source

And in case that isn't very clear, I mean these vertical battens cut into a curvy shape under the verandah, to add a bit of character.

Source

So that was the plan. But then it came time for me to figure out how to accurately describe to my carpenter what I wanted, so I pulled up this old picture I took of the house while the roof scaffolding up, and I pulled out my virtual paintbrush and started drawing all over it. I was certain that I wanted to extend the two narrow vertical sections of weatherboards to the left of the staircase all the way down to the ground. But then it came time to draw on the curvy batten skirt between them, and something happened. Either I wasn't confident about my ability to freehand a curve using a computer mouse, or it just didn't feel right to put a curve in there when all of the rest of the lines are so straight.

Whichever it was, those straight lined bits beneath the upper story were what I ended up requesting, and I felt good about it!

I felt even better when the carpenters actually started building it. The weatherboard sections got framed up and installed...

And we decided to basically replicate the stair railings, with the same size of batten and spacing and top and bottom rails, a little separated from the bottom of the verandah so there's a gap. Again, just like the stair railing only squished!

I could hardly contain my excitement to see those little details finally taking shape! I've wanted to do this for so long!!

So back to the other side! Here's my shoddy little paint drawing again. As you can see, the area to the right of the stairs also got similar treatment, although I decided not to continue any weatherboards down to the ground on that side. I just couldn't make it seem like it would work well.

In reality, this is what that area looked like. The little spindly naked steel pole in the corner certainly wasn't particularly attractive, so the builder came up with an idea to simply box it out with some decking boards so it would actually look like a nice chunky timber post.

And so, in hardly any time at all, that area transformed into this!

A thousand times better, don't you think? Even if the colours are still a mismatched hodge podge of ugliness, at least now all the various timber things look like they're supposed to be there.

So then the house looked like this! Major improvement, right?

But we weren't quite done. The same council issues that made us raise the floor in all the living areas downstairs also dictated that we not close in the garages with weatherboards either, as we had originally planned.

Instead, we had to let air flow through. So, the carpenters ripped out all of the timber framing between the garages, replaced it with steel crossbars for bracing...

And started installing battens.

These kinds of tasks make me so happy, because they feel almost instantaneous. One minute there's nothing, the next minute there's something that looks like a wall!

So this became the front wall of our garage...

Which looked like this from the front. So finished-looking all of a sudden!

And it was a pretty dramatic improvement inside as well.

So there you have it! In what has to rank as one of the most drastic changes we've experienced so far, the house turned into this! If you ignore the junk in the front yard, not half bad, right?

Is anyone else DYING to see some new paint on the front there like me?