Sending Fish Down the Gutters

Another week, another house project. We realized that all of this time at home is a great opportunity to continue our repainting of the whole house. This time it was the fishy room's turn. And, we had an extra can of paint leftover from the upstairs playroom repainting, so it's like it was meant to be - no trip to the store required. You can see why it was the "fishy" room; it had a weird two-tone blue paint job with aquatic murals everywhere. Hadley was kind of sad to paint over the fish, but I was ready for them to go.

The kids were excellent helpers. They both helped clear the room, which had a lot of stuff collected in it. Hadley taped off all of the baseboards and removed the outlet covers, while Owen climbed the ladder to take down the curtain rod brackets. Hadley also helped me prime over the fish and dark blue with our quart of sample paint, so Owen could finish his school report on Michael Dell. Then they both rollered all of the walls; H getting the lower half and O with the extender for the upper half. I only had to do the finesse work on the edges!

Once again, we didn't love this paint color and the way it changes in the light, but it's what we had, so we pressed on. I think it ended up okay. This room is our music/craft/cat room, so maybe the bland color will be something we can spice up with art...?

It was a hot day, and with the three of us working in that small west-facing room we could definitely tell it. Kona Ice was coming through the neighborhood, so I figured we had earned a treat. The best part was that it was right outside our front door! Mmm, neon-colored, frozen sugar water sure hit the spot! 

A few days later, we finally decided to bite the bullet and get gutters for the back of the house. Drainage in the backyard is an issue, and the rain splatter has discolored the brick and decimates any potted plants that I put around the back door. Plus, once we wash and repaint the siding, the gutters are supposed to keep the mildew at bay. It's not glamorous, but we were excited to add the gutters. I guess that's how you know you are getting old. Enjoy these before-and-afters.

A subtle change all along the back, including this corner, which will help protect the new fence, too.

Garage and walkway gutters will make this walk much more tolerable on rainy days. Now we really need to paint the garage door.

Not sure why they didn't combine these two downspouts. And like any improvement, now the new stuff makes the old stuff look even worse...

We had these gutters professionally installed by a local company that forms the seamless gutters out of the back of their van. There were some crazy long gutters! I'm so glad that we didn't try to do this ourselves!