Our Remodeled Cape Cod House
Here's a view of our dearly beloved and fondly remembered Cape Cod house, which we remodeled from top to toe. Though a small house, it felt very comfortable to live in (the living room felt downright spacious) and it was a very solid old brick house. Oh I miss it!
Click here to view a bigger version of this after-house-remodel picture.
Here's the view of the screened porch we put on, and what was once the really unkempt and overgrown back yard of a corner lot now contains a beautiful new house (we sold it to a builder who had taken care of all the details of subdividing). Our house now had a smaller lot, but a cleaner one, and the neighborhood improved in value with the building of the new luxurious home next door. (We also worked out a timely deal with the builder to put a concrete driveway which went right up to our back door, there was just enough room to park one car there. Now the house had off-street parking!) There's a nice view of the porta-potty here too. Great...
Click here to view a bigger version of this other after-house remodel picture.
So much of the work happened on the inside, but from the exterior you can see all the brand-new replacement windows we had installed. That was a learning experience. The first few windows we contracted through Home Depot. Then we learend about a company that did wholesale window installations out of Baltimore, and they did the rest of the house for like, half the price of Home Depot. Plus, the Home Depot installation guy did a poor job on caulking one of our windows - we had rain water pouring in one day. The other guys were maybe not quite as neat with the caulk, but the windows were sealed quite well. These combination windows were awesome. You could tilt in the top to clean them, they had safety latches so the kids couldn't fall out a second story window but you could still have them open a little for breeze, and they were such a nice clean white color against the red brick of the house.
Another thing you can view from the exterior is the chimney cap. It was one of only a couple things a home inspector had flagged on the inspection when we bought the house (boy did we find the things he missed subsequently...). We didn't want it to hold up the sale, so we had one installed. A pest-removal guy (who came to get the squirrels out of our attic) was extremely impressed by our super-duper deluxe chimney cap.
We had new siding put on the back of the house. It only had siding on a small part of the back, on the second floor above a first floor bedroom that for some reason didn't have a second floor counterpart above it (ie, the master bedroom on the 2nd floor overlooked the roof of this room. There was a crack running the length of the room on the ceiling from where the 2nd story met that room, because of water getting in, hence we had to replace that part of the roof as well.
The best curb-appeal improvement to the house happened courtesy of Hurricane Isabella and our insurance company. Isabella ripped one side of the screen porch off, so we got some money to repair it. We installed vinyl railings and vinyl pillars, and put up new screens. It was a great place to hang out and catch a breeze in the evening (when the breeze wasn't blowing our way from the direction of the porta-potty anyway).
We did some landscaping, of course. We planted a maple tree in the front yard to make up for the huge old tree we unfortanately caused to be cut down when we sold the back part of the lot to the builder. We pulled out some overgrown evergreen shrubs around the foundation, and put in some new shrubs, including some pretty rhodedendrons, azaleas and hydrangeas - favorites in gardens throughout Maryland, I had noticed. We put a bed in on the front corner of the lot and planted a few evergreen shrubs, then stuck in a few mums when we put the house on the market - a nice punch of color.
In summary, by the time we sold it, we had the house exactly the way we want it. Figures.
