Renovating the exterior of our cottage turned out to be a huge undertaking of scraping and painting. The cottage had not been painted in roughly 30 years. It took about two to three weeks to scrape all the paint, blast and smooth the surface with water and elbow grease.
We also removed an old rusted out ugly awning that didn’t fit our vision. Here’s what it looked like right after we took it down.
All the skirts along the base of the house were replaced and we added gutters. Gutters are inexpensive, can be purchased for a couple hundred dollars and they saved the exterior of our cottage. After 7 years, it still looks like new!
Here’s a great article from This Old House on choosing the right gutters for your home and installing yourself.
The original porch was literally a cement block anterior to the front door. It wasn’t very big and it was falling apart. We wanted an outdoor area where we could sit and drink our morning coffee, or read a book in the afternoon breeze, or have a cocktail in the evening. So with that vision we created our deck.
We squared off a large front area, dug it out and removed some of the flagstone pathway to accommodate it.
We used pressure treated wood from Lamb Lumber to tolerate the changing weather patterns.
Here’s what it looks like today!
