Spring Has Sprung

I completed my bathroom project in early March 2016.  It was good to have something (mostly) completed on the house.  The finishing touches didn't come until much, much later, but I had a toilet and something actually looked new and nice.  But Marguerite's house, for the most part, still looked (and smelled) like Marguerite's house... both inside and out.

I had some wood rot repaired around the eaves on the front of the house and the front steps redone when I first took possession because it was something the city code enforcement had noted on a citation.  There was also the issue of THE GARAGE.  I have looked and looked through my photos, but I don't think I ever took a before picture of it.  It was that overwhelming/depressing.  You can see it in the background in the first pic.  The other two images are from google maps from July 2014.  

At some point during the period the house was abandoned, the huge water oak tree in front of the house lost a limb that went through the roof of the detached garage.  And no one fixed it.  For years.  There was actually a discussion about whether it would be more cost effective to tear the thing down, or repair it.  Hell... I wasn't really sure it could be repaired, definitely not something I was going to do myself.  The concrete guy who did the front steps had his cousin help him do the job.  He happened to be a carpenter who offered to give me an estimate on the garage.

And so, the work began when the weather started getting a little more tolerable.  There was a hole in the roof about 5 or 6 feet in diameter.  Rain water had seeped in and rotted the roof decking, the rafters, the header of that side wall, and the tops of the studs.  They tore off one whole side of the roof and decking, and scissored in new wood for the studs as well as the rafters.  Then they put on new roof decking and a new roof (for the whole garage). 

Once it was structurally sound, we pressure washed the whole thing which removed most of the paint that was on it.  There wasn't much paint to start with, but the rest blew off pretty easily.  There was also wood rot on the siding around the bottom, so those panels were replaced as well.  Besides the crew I hired, my mom and step-dad did some of the siding replacement.  And my uncle was in charge of the pressure washing on the ladder... mostly because he is on the only one tall enough to reach the peak in the front with the ladder we had.

I put a coat of primer on the exterior and we had a new door installed.  

At this point, summer was approaching fast and I didn't want anyone to be painting in the hottest part of the year in Memphis.  So I asked for help and received it from my niece and her fiance.  I opted for a yellow color that would somewhat match the yellow brick on the house, with white trim.  Yellow brick houses (if you look at them closely) are a variety of yellows.  So I just picked one that was kind of in the middle of all the shades in the brick.

Concurrent to the garage work going on, we were also doing a MAJOR cleanup of the property outside.  Keeping in mind that nobody had been maintaining this house (inside or out) and that there are huge oak trees all over this neighborhood (two in Marguerite's yard), you can imagine the condition outside.  Every flower bed was overtaken by weeds.  The fence line was covered in vines, trees, bushes and poison ivy.  And there was at least 6 years of leaves in the yard. 

The leaves had been left for so long, that after you removed the top layers, what was underneath looked like layers of paper.  I was very thankful to be able to use my dad's super backpack blower or we would probably still be out there picking up leaves right now.  There were hundreds of bags.  This house is on a corner lot and the bags of leaves and yard waste (limbs, bushes, etc) covered the curb going all the way around the house on the front and side streets.

We also removed the shutters (that had seen better days) and pressure washed the house (thanks to my step-dad for the pressure washer).  The difference this made was really amazing.  My husband, mom, step-dad, and uncle all helped with the cleanup.  And this is when the neighbors came out of the woodwork... excited to see someone had bought the property and was cleaning it up.

They told me that Marguerite loved her yard.  That she loved planting flowers and always kept it looking nice.  They even recalled that there used to be a little cedar tree in the flower bed by the corner that she would decorate like a Christmas tree every year.  It had been taken over by the holly bushes and died at some point during the vacant period.  When I cleaned out the flower beds, I discovered azalea bushes I didn't even know were in there.  And once the leaves were gone, little hosta lilies began coming up through the dirt.  They were (and still are) tiny, but I guess they were the only parts that survived the years being buried under the leaves.

The before and after on this one was also pretty significant.  I was proud that the outside of the house was starting to look like a property that was being loved again.

POST SCRIPT...

I wanted to add this final note.  When I started working on the house, I went to google maps and saved out the images they had of the exterior from the street view.  There were three dates from 2007, 2012 and 2014.  I remember trying to determine by these photos at what point the garage was damaged (it happened at some point between the 2007 and 2012 images).  But I recall that I noticed a black cat in the images from 2014.  As you moved up the street and passed Marguerite's house, the black cat was sitting on the front walkway and then appeared to have hopped the fence and was starting to walk away across the street.  I noticed the cat in these images on google maps because at the time, there was a solid black cat hanging around the house when I would go over there to work.  I mused that it must be the same cat and thought more than once that maybe it was Marguerite.  Not long after we cleaned up the outside, the cat disappeared and I never saw it again.  The image below is the only one I saved back then from google maps that includes the cat.  I would like to note, that although the images are still clearly from 2014, google maps does not have images with the cat in them anymore.  The ones at the top of this blog are the ones I pulled from the application this morning.  I don't know why they were replaced.  I just know I am glad I saved out this one so I can report I am not crazy (well at least not about that).  Maybe it was Marguerite.  And maybe this is my sign that she is gone...