Now that it’s warm enough to venture outside with a camera, I thought it was about time to show this blog’s readers what the Salvaged Beauty looks like. I snapped this photo last week after raking up an awful lot of crap off the front lawn; since then, I even got John to take down the Xmas lights you see in the photo.

To the best of our knowledge, the house was built around 1915 by a member of the Carnegie family (a prominent Scottish family in the Port Perry area that operated both flour and lumber mills here at the turn of the last century).
I suppose the style of house is closest to what many of you would call a Foursquare, although I’d never heard of that term until recent years (perhaps it’s not used within Canada much). I have noticed that the floor plan of our house has many similarities to certain Sears and Alladin kit home models, and I would guess that many homebuilders of that time period (especially if well-connected to a planing mill) were influenced by the mail-order houses.

Since we purchased this money pit in 2001, we haven’t made any significant changes to the front of the house, although it is desperately crying out for some TLC. What this photo doesn’t convey is the punky porch planking (exacerbated by the fact it had been covered with indoor/outdoor carpeting) and failing paint on the porch columns and railings. You’ll also notice that the porch is missing the lattice on the bottom, which we removed last summer while working on the brick porch pier at the left of the photo. We plan to make up new lattice, as what we removed was in pretty sad shape. One other item on my lengthy ‘honey-do’ list is getting rid of the damned television antennae, which serves no purpose except to offer welcoming easy access to any critter interested in chewing through our roof’s soffit and fascia. It doesn’t surprise me that no one is willing to do this job…but the scrap metal is free for the taking.

We’ve already had to remove a lot of foundation plantings that had become too overgrown and unfortunately, the future of almost every bit of plant life you see in the photo is up for debate. We hope to do more porch work this summer, so I doubt we’ll be planting anything new for some time yet.

Last summer, we ripped out two large cedars that flanked the porch (you can see these in the photo at the right, taken about the time we purchased the house). One’s root system had already displaced a porch pier, and it had to be completely dug up and the pier rebuilt. We used the original bricks to rebuild the pier. The stump of the cedar at the right of the photo remains, because the one planting I refuse to disturb is the beautiful Peegee hydrangea (H. paniculata grandiflora), which is a profusion of white blooms at the end of summer, changing first to green and later, to rich rose and gold tones. It’s a real stunner.

Looking at the front of my house, so bare at this time of year, it almost seems like we’ve taken a step backwards in terms of its curb appeal…but I suppose that no amount of flowers and foliage will remedy the multitude of problems that truly need to be addressed.

technorati tags: curb+appeal, renovation, house+exteriors, landscaping