One Room Challenge // Exterior Week 5

Hey guys!

Well, it's Week 5 of the One Room Challenge, and unfortunately, it's bad news bears around here. Not only am I NOT going to have a gorgeous Hollandlac Brilliant painted front door for the challenge end next Thursday, I'm not even going to have a painted front door, and it's probable I won't have a new front door at all!

The Hollandlac turned out to be delusions of grandeur (see last week's post if you have no idea what Hollandlac means). As if the 5+ day life-threatening painting process wasn't obstacle enough, the cost of the labor was almost as much as the door itself. And the darn Chicago weather won't allow it anyway.

Which it turns out is not only the case for the Hollandlac, but as I just learned, for any paint. I just hung up with J.C. Licht where I tried to order the Farrow & Ball Full Gloss as a back up, and the guy told me the exterior painting window closed three weeks ago (duh lady). He said paint has to cure for at least 5 days with above 50 degree temps. Even our highs will be barely above 50 in another day.

I can't paint the door.

On the other hand, I also can't NOT paint it. After learning that I'd missed my weather window, I checked with Home Depot and the manufacturer requires the door be painted within 30 days of installation to protect it. I assume failure to comply will void the warranty / totally ruin the door forever.

I have to paint the door.

Not that I even have a door. Home Depot is apparently holding it hostage. The installers were supposed to call me Monday, and it's Thursday sooooo.....

I have no door.

Ryan thinks we should just wait until Spring to install the door. You know, be all pragmatic and practical. Paint it when the weather is nice, take our time and do it right, etc. etc. Ugh. I think we should set up a heated tent system around the perimeter of our house and turn it into Summer Land. You know, grow tropicals and wear shorts and never go past our driveway again.

Everything else on our to-do list has been annoyingly difficult, yet with mostly happy outcomes. I tried to have the driveway sealed, but again, we missed our weather window. So that money went to the mailbox. I am thrilled to report that we put fifty bucks into it and it now looks like a million. The old wood post was yucky and brown and growing some sort of fungus, and the mailboxes were rusted and generally disgusting.

We replaced the rotted piece of wood that held the boxes, added a decorative post cap, sanded the whole thing down, and gave it a coat of primer and a coat of exterior lacquer. Then we replaced the boxes with classic black. The neighbor across the street rang my bell to tell us how good it looks! It's crazy how those tiny changes can drastically up your curb appeal.

The outside lights I ordered turned out to be too small. I drove over an hour away to purchase a different style I liked online, then hated them when I saw them in person. I then purchased a larger barn light, but it needed to be spray painted dark (it's the Lowes light from my mood board- I didn't end up buying it originally because it looks like bronze or black but it's actually bright galvanized silver IRL). So now I'm waiting for the weather (YOU AGAIN!) to cooperate so we can finish spray painting them. Also after we started spray painting them, I read the can of paint and it said "not for use on galvanized metal." It kinda figures the one and only thing I can't use it on is what I just used it on.

At least our hoarding paid off and the Tuft & Needle box can now serve as our spray-paint sarcophagus.

We did have success with building planter boxes! We ended up buying cedar fence planks and using this tutorial as a jumping off point. They're gorgeous and I love them! I am so excited to get them planted. The only frustration there was my idiot move of not buying the inserts before we built the boxes. It would have been much better to build the boxes to fit the inserts, than to hit six stores trying to find inserts to fit the boxes (and having to drill out the posts of the boxes to shove them in there).

Doh!

The house numbers are gorgeous and I love them. They are also not installed yet because they are the worst kind of impossible to install. They require boring holes, caulking, gluing, taping, and surrender of your sanity.

Time change has been a peach. Ryan has been having a really fun time installing shutters on a ladder in the pitch dark. And wiring lights in the dark. And taking lights back down in the dark. And having no lights at all...in the dark.

I cleaned out our flower beds and got all the yucky dead stuff out and put down some more mulch. Now it looks really empty! And of course, we couldn't get any shrubs in before the weather turned. They wouldn't have made for much of a reveal anyway since they would have been barren sticks.

I'm certainly proud of the progress we have made. We're going to get a ton of stuff crossed off our exterior wish list, and the neighbors have been really impressed! But it bums me out to no end that I won't have a front door next week (and you KNOW I'm still holding out hope for an 11th hour miracle) since that was exactly half of the main objectives I set out to accomplish. I wish I could say I was excited to show the house to you, but without the front door I'm kinda meh to show it to you! Honesty in church. :) In any case, that is the beauty of this challenge. It's a reality show- you never know what's going to happen. We'll keep plugging along and see how this wraps up.

Off to visit the other brave soldiers of the ORC at Linda's!