5 Year Anniversary

Hard to believe it's been five years already. Funny that I thought I'd have the whole house restored in five years. Now I see why people laughed when I said that was the goal. Here is what was accomplished in the past year:

• I painstakingly disassembled an entire 2-car carriage house in less than a week and moved all the materials to my yard where I built a rack for all the 2x4s and siding and it is stacked neatly.
• I acquired a lot of architectural salvage for resale or use in my home. The things I've acquired that will be used in my house someday are: a full size clawfoot tub, a very unique 2-basin 100 year old pedestal bathroom sink, coffered ceiling, wide crown molding, a big oak room divider with square columns, sandstone stair treads, heat registers, and some other misc items.
• I purchased 18 sq of new Vermont slate in random widths and historic color blend. I plan to have the new roof installed sometime in the next few weeks. The current roof, consisting of original slate covered with asphalt, will be completely torn down, some wood repairs are necessary, and the new slate will be installed with copper accents. The roof over the built-in cabinet kick out in the back of the house will be done in standing seam copper. And I will put a copper ridge vent along the entire peak as well as eave vents to circulate air in the attic.
• I completed the restoration of the South side of the house. This consisted of stripping all the paint down to bare wood, replacing all of the window sill edges and drip caps of every window, repairing or replacing all broken clapboards, sanding the entire surface with 80 grit, washing with TSP, priming with Sherwin Williams oil based primer, and caulking all vertical seams.
• I also removed the gutters, cleaned them with degreaser, primed with an appropriate primer, and rehung them. They will be painted along with the house until I am able to put copper half-round gutters on the house.

I didn't work on any of my indoor projects this winter. I think I just needed to recuperate from everything done over the summer. I have a tendency to overexert myself in the summer months. This has been a horrendous winter. It started early and doesn't seem like it will ever end. I'm hoping this is the final week of the bad weather and planning on setting up scaffolding next week to finish the back of the house.