A Wedding! (In this house)

There is nothing like a major family event to inspire a whole lot of spring cleaning and to revive a neglected house blog. Between now and early August, our house will be transformed from a neglected, unkempt look to wedding beauty. The wedding will be inside and the dinner just outside the house. Inside, outside, and upside down, we have a whole lot of projects. The deadline means that we may actually complete them.

• Exterior paint. This is a whole lot of prep work and then a whole lot of painting. Hopefully a crew will do a good bit of it. We have not found the painter, but we are beginning to assemble products, including a rot treatment for some of the beams on the eaves.

• New decking. The front deck, where the wedding party may have their dinner, is actually falling apart. We had planned to re-deck it in the next year. Make that by August.

•  De-trashing our utility areas. This has also been in the plan for a while. I’ll get some photos to make the point that if you leave a lot of trash around, your house can look trashy. Who knew.

• Rock on roadways. The landscape includes a small road through the property. Half of it has stone to keep down the mud, dirt, and weeds. We’ll finish that three-year-old project.

Besides these four key projects, we have many smaller fix-it sort of jobs in the landscape and to support some of the bigger projects like painting. The whirlwind is about to begin.