Paint colors; Inside & Outside

So so so so many choices!
From left to right:
1st floor man cave
1st floor main area (none of these worked)
2nd floor office
Exterior

Exterior options

Chris painting (from left to right) exterior options
number 1-7

We took our favorite exterior options (#2 &
#3) and painted them around the house!
In the sun & shade, plus on the old &
new siding!
We chose #3 - shown on the right here!

Some of our first efforts on the 1st floor color.
We wanted a light gray....darker than the white trim but
lighter than our cabinets. Harder to find than you'd
imagine! This includes living room, dining room,
 hall bathroom, kitchen, family room and our master bedroom!
I struggled mightily with this choice!

2nd floor color options - we wanted an off white that would
show off the trim but not be too bold. This paint is for
the foyer, front stairwell, upstairs hallway, guest rooms &
the hall bathroom. Bottom row center is the winner!

Gray, gray, gray.
I painted lots of color options on this wall
in the kitchen! We wanted to be as sure as possible we were
making the right choice! We went with the color on the lower
left (its repeated on both sides of the door).

We are rocking the man cave like it is
a transplant from our condo! It will be painted
brown & have virtually the same furniture :)

The winning man cave color is on the right.
The one on the left looks too much like a dirty diaper :(

Chris showing off the office window with the color
options. The darkest one won here :) Its in the center

I DIYed the basement laundry area wall....because it is in
the basement & it doesn't matter! The middle color won!

I wanted to go bold & fun. One might think this is too
dark of a color for a basement; I went high gloss to
bounce the light around the room. Our basement has some
above grade windows which give it some natural light,
which helps!

In case you care to buy any of these colors, we used all Benjamin Moore paints. Here is a list of what we bought & where we're using it:

Exterior: Deep Royal

1st Floor + Master Bedroom: Whitestone at 50% strength

2nd Floor + Foyer/Stairwell: China White

Man Cave: Whitall Brown

Office: Van Deusen Blue

Laundry Area: Old Navy

A new driveway & LOTS of machines

 When we embarked on the planning phase of this project with our architect, Tom, we had a few requests about the exterior of the house: lose the side porch on the west side of the house, build a new one on the east side (where the driveway is), keep the driveway for off street parking but shorten it to make way for a hefty (aka hardworking) side porch.

Just too tempting not too. My father-in-law
wondered if I have a new career path!

Too tempting not to....Chris driving the Bobcat on
Sunday

Welllllllllllll, the City of Evanston Zoning Department had other ideas. As it turns out, a driveway (in Evanston) must terminate a parking pad. The parking pad can be no more than 30 feet from the rear lot line. In our case, this puts our parking pad smack in the middle of our backyard! We didn't realize it, but we had a parking pad already - it was hiding under an awful lot of gardening paraphernalia and had a layer of weeds growing on it.

May, 2015: in the background of this photo you can see the area
that is our "parking pad" it was covered by a lot. I was
in no way exaggerating!

So, the good news? After the Zoning Department rejected our building permit application because our plans were in violation of the above referenced zoning code, Tom did a quick redraw. The new (& thankfully approved) drawings show our driveway being rerouted around our slightly narrower porch. Chris & I have been calling it the "S curve".

The bad news? Since this was a change made after we signed our contract, none of it is included in the price we planned on paying! Wah wah. 

It was fun to watch all the machines work on our property though! Check out the photos to see the progress they made starting Saturday April 16 and wrapping up by Wednesday April 20! Any toddler in your life would've loved these work days! The neighborhood kids sure did! We had the bobcat, mini bulldozer, dump truck, pumper truck (to pump concrete from the mixing truck into our crawl space which was also getting finished), cement mixing truck, along with an equipment truck & 3 pick up trucks. Our street is small. Our yard is small. We were overrun with giant vehicles!! Honestly though? It was really entertaining.

Bobcat delivery on Saturday

The old driveway before the demolition
got started

The old driveway with the planning of the
new driveway. You might be struck by
how similar the old
and new look :)

Here is a video of the mini bulldozer 

working with the bobcat to pull up the old driveway piece by piece!

Lots & lots of heavy equipment in the backyard!

I didn't think things in the backyard could get any worse.........and then a 4.5 foot high dirt pile rose up in the
middle of all the chaos. That was decidedly worse!

Old driveway is gone - bobcat is
grading out the space to make way for the new

Chris is admiring the concrete forms that are
part way put up. The forms require an
inspection by the City of Evanston. I
guess it is easier to adjust the forms than
the concrete once its poured!

Finished forms

Dad checking out the fancy new driveway...
or is he wondering why it looks nearly
identical to the old driveway?!?

We are for sure the classiest house on the block. The crime scene caution tape is
really sealing the deal!
But- here it is! The final product!

Of course we did :) Though not in the driveway, we
put our initials in the sidewalk that was patched on the
other side of the house. Because concrete is forever......
or 100 years or so!

Chim chim-i-ney, chim chim-i-ney chim, chim, che-roo!

As of Friday night; our chimney chase is on the house! 

What is a chimney chase? For all intents & purposes (aka - mine) it is the chimney. 

In reality it specifically refers to wood frame box that will hold a metal pipe which will be connected to our "fire box" aka fireplace and take the smoke outside, I'm almost sure the metal pipe I refer to is what is technically the "chimney". We don't have one of those yet.

. 

Blah, blah, blah you might say. (I might agree).

On to the fun, this is what it looks like:

Yahoo! New chimney chase!
Siding can't get on that yellow fast enough!

Notice the new hole for the side door peeking out toward the right hand side of the photo above? Pretty excited about it; any progress is good progress!

Also, because I have it & I love the haunted house creepy nighttime photos:

What's not to love about our new
haunted chimney??

And in case you care to see it, this is what the outside looked like last winter:

I think we've improved upon it!

Update 1/12/2016:
We went to the house last night to see what the framers were up to yesterday and look what we found:

Our new fireplace & hearth are framed!
I am so pleased with this! The firebox we bought will
slide into the cavity and be the source of many cozy
winter days & nights in our future home!

Holes for the New Windows

The look and feel of the exterior of the house is really taking shape, 

the framers cut the holes to accommodate our new windows, 

French doors in our bedroom and sliding door in the family room.

New attic window hole is cut!
4 new windows will go in the 3 plywood
spots on the 2nd floor. 

We're missing the hole for the window on the
right, but the opening for the sliding door is
ready and the hole on the left is waiting for
its new window!

From right to left, new stairwell window between the 1st and
2nd floors. 1st floor - new windows above the kitchen sink.
2nd floor new master bathroom window.