Hi everyone!  After a couple of short trips and one long road trip (plus time well spent with family) we are back. 

We’ve been quite busy the last few weeks on the home front and in between, I simply had not found time to share anything.  But trust me, it’s good stuff.  There are several items on my list to share, which includes more work done on the side porch, more hardware restored (the little door chimes… I LOVE these!), painting on the back of the house second floor, pressure washing and repainting the back block wall, interior work on the landing and the stairs (removing wallpaper, removing paint, re-staining the stairs and the decision of to paint or stain the spindles of the stairs).   And the great thing about all of it is, it’s all the fun stuff, where we see the changes! 

I’ll get to the rest of that very soon, but for now, let me share what we did, or rather Paul did in October with the front of the house and the bay window, the gable on the bay window, to be exact. 

Although he had finished restoring the bay, if you look closely at our photo on the website and below here, you’ll see it’s not finished.  It’s still peeling paint and the wood is in unknown condition. 

The problem has always been with this section is that it’s over 40 ft in the air and the yard has a slope of probably 25 degrees away from the house.   And even if you can reach that height, you have to reach up and over the extended bay space to get to the gable.  Uhh…okay who built this?  Lol. 

 As you can see in this old photo from previous work with scaffolding, four sections high and he still cannot reach up and over to the tip of the gable. 

You may recall we previously hired a bucket truck to reach some points of the side of the bay but with the slope of the yard away from the house, even the highest extension of the bucket truck could not reach the gable. 

Believe me, Paul considered everything….

After some serious research though and deciding against the two options above ;-), it seemed the only relatively safe way to have any chance of reaching the top of the gable was to rent a special kind of lift.  

The problem with these things is that they require a flat surface to be level before it will operate.   For anyone who has seen our yard, that is NOT our yard but we had no choice.  What could we do? We have to make this work since the photos above are not an option.  To set this up, we had two issues:

• first was getting the lift in position up that grade
• secondly, was to make it level

The company that delivered the lift got it to the front of the yard (that’s a whole other story, but I won’t go into that, needless to say, nail biting for me) but the delivery truck could not get the unit up the hill towards the house. 

There had been rain the night before the and ground and grass were slick causing his tires to spin with every attempt.  However, the lift was here and on the clock so Paul told him he could leave it in the front yard and Paul would find a way to move it up the hill to the house.   The delivery driver said it wasn’t possible, but he doesn’t know Paul.  😉 

Paul drove his truck around to the front yard and attached the lift to his truck. The plan was to back up the truck to the top of the hill, pushing the lift behind it towards the house.  On that wet ground, this did not go well.  All late afternoon and into the early evening he worked on this with me trying to help where I could. The truck would start, the tires would gain traction at first, then begin spinning, the truck would then shift left to right and the unit would jackknife, again and again.  After several attempts, wheels spinning and zig zagging each time, a prayer or two on my side and a couple of great men who walked up and offered to help push the truck up the hill. With our new combined effort, up the hill it went!  A huge thank you again to these men, whoever they were.  😊

The second issue was getting this thing level.  Again, with the slope it was a challenge.  Paul ended up digging down in the yard in the front where the pads of the unit rested, and stacking up boards and bricks on the down side of the unit where those pads rested, to raise them.  After several “try this, no wait, now the left leg is out…” Finally, about 6:30 pm that night we made the unit level!   Footnote here, we now have added to our landscaping to do list:  RESLOPE THIS YARD. Lol.  😊

A shot the next morning of the unit.  Here it is, in the sun, in all its glory, dug down in the front, lifted up in the back but that beast is level!  Tada!   (don’t look at the torn up grass to the left, lol)

Now, after all the digging down, would it now reach the top of the gable?

YES!!!

I’m quite sure we were the entertainment for the neighborhood that week while Paul worked. And the beauty of it was, it worked so well that he was done early with the gable and used the time remaining to touch up some areas he had previously done with the scaffolding.  Here are a few pics of Paul working away on the gable that week.  And because of the cage where he was, I actually felt better about him being in this than the scaffolding, BY FAR! 

And now the gable was matching the rest of the house and looking finished and with a new metal roof!

Wow.  Remember what this used to look like?  I’m so proud of Paul for taking this on, as well as so many other projects the way he has. If he didn’t know about a project we approached, he learned and just leaned in. I glean a lot along the way myself.

Looking back it’s hard to believe so much has changed and so far, we’ve been able to do it by ourselves. But one by one, project by project, the only way to tackle it, as with most things in life, was head on.