Interesting link about the history of stucco and preservation and repair my mother-in law passed on. Information we’re going to start needing pretty soon if we want to repair some of the damage we’ve done. Well, it’s not all our fault – obviously the place needed work when we bought it.
Preservation Brief 22: The preservation and repair of stucco
Tags: stucco
When we got back from our rafting trip in Pennsylvania this Labor Day weekend, we returned to our half painted office and all disorganized house.
There seems to be a strange phenomenon in the house that as you work in the evenings, instead of cooling down the house gets hotter. Maybe the stucco house releases heat stored up in the day as the evening goes on. By the end of the evening I felt like I had spent an hour sweating it out at a bad spa and we finished putting up the paint on the walls of the office. We painted the office “spinning wheel” by dutch boy, and decided not to change the color any (we were debating making it lighter), and are in retrospect both pretty happy with the results. I’m leaving the trim white.
The office is not part of the great trim reclaiming project since if we do decide to add on a second story, this room is currently the top contender for where the stairs will go. No point is doing a lot of work on it when it might all just be ripped out. Plus it will be nice to have at least one room that is done.
Still to do: touch up the trim, paint the pink closet white and put up a curtain over the closet.
One of the first things that I noticed about our house is that it does not have all of the nice stucco detail that a lot of the homes around Oak Park have. It is what makes the stucco charming. Matt used to hate stucco until he saw the hosues here. In Oak Park, they fit nicely in the nighborhood, and don’t seem tacky, but rather charming. A large part of this is the trim, which our house is sorely lacking.
These are some of the details we found on our walk today that I think might be nice.
Rusty takes time to smell the flowers
So to get ideas for what we want to do to the outside of the house, Thor and I have started taking a camera on our walks with the dog. We’re hoping this will not only help us figure out what we like, but exactly what is wrong with the house now that we need to fix.
Right now I don’t think that the outside of the house could get much uglier or have less character, so anything we do is bound to be an improvement. However, any changes we make we definitely want to fit in with the character of the neighborhood. And looking at a house and knowing instinctively that it is ugly is different from figuring out how you need to fix it. So, in our ramblings we have identified the main problem areas, and hopefully are beginning to get some ideas on what we want to do.
So pictures of things we like will be forth coming, and maybe then we can gradually compete for second ugliest house on the block