Our Little Yellow House

Summer 2012

This is our house last summer before we replaced the 30 year old siding.  We bought the house in April 2009.  Since then, we have slowly been remodeling the whole house.

Besides replacing the siding, we have also painted it a lighter and brighter yellow.  We decided on "Lively Yellow" by Behr with pure white for the trim.  Our front door is painted "Candy Violet" by Behr.  I wanted something fun for the front door as we remodeled and the color actually matches the petals of the Dame's Rocket that grows in the front borders each spring.  It looks a little more purple in the first picture than the picture below shows.  It will stay this color until we replace the door.

We are now so close to being finished with the exterior of this house.  We are crossing or fingers that the weather stays nice through this weekend so we can finish siding, caulk, and paint!   It has been an interesting journey with lots of setbacks.  We would most likely be done if it weren't for those pesky trees!  

Late Summer 2012

I have decided I am not a fan of Silver Maple trees or Bradford Pears.  They are fast growing trees and the wood is soft and weak.  They constantly drop branches.  During the time we were painting the front of the house we had a couple of tree limbs fall off the Silver Maple in the front yard.  

There is less of a chance of this happening if the trees are properly pruned each year to help shape their fast growth.  However, when we bought this house in 2009 we inherited older trees that were not pruned as they were growing and now limbs are dropping.  This spring as we were finishing the back of the house my husband noticed the Bradford Pear had split clean down the middle of the trunk all the way to the ground.  Splendid!

Early Spring 2013 bringing down the Bradford Pear

We were fortunate that none of the spring storm winds had brought the tree down but when the wind would blow you could see straight through the crack by almost an inch in places.  It was only a matter of time before it would fall on someone.  It had to come down right away.

My husband stopped working on the house to get rid of the tree.  We are not entirely sure how old this tree was but we estimated 25+ years by the growth rings.  We had expected this tree to fail because we had watched others in the neighborhood fail every spring.  Bradford Pear trees have an awful reputation for weak wood so we watched for signs each year.

Bradford Pear Spring 2010 & Dargo our first Border Collie (RIP 1/11)

I was sad to bring down this tree because they are prettiest in the spring when they are flush with white blossoms.  I won't miss the awful smell though!  Their blossoms smell foul and every spring it smelled like a critter had died in the yard!  Yup, they smell that bad.

There is good that came from removing the tree.  We have been able to give away and keep quite a bit of kindling and firewood.  We were able to make a grape arbor, a little fence line for our potager garden, and I should be able to use quite a few of the small branches that are remaining for trellising the vegetables next spring.  Just this past week we had another limb and a branch drop from the maple so it may be cut down soon as well.  We will have an arborist take a look at it to see what should be done.

Grape Arbor

Potager Fence

Now, I am optimistic I will be able to update this post with pictures of a fully painted house after this weekend!  

Crossing fingers...