Buttoning up the exterior

A flurry of activity is ramping up inside and outside the house. We got the custom designed cedar garage doors installed in early February, followed by the over-sized knotty alder front door at the end of the month. We put in some more sweat equity to stain the garage doors and the front door ourselves. Turns out, we are getting pretty good at staining, but it isn’t much fun at all!

The masons have been on site since late February to prep the house for stone and stucco. They started with the exterior stone around the base of the house and worked their way to the front porch which greets visitors with a massive wall of stone. They also added the stone chimney from the outdoor fireplace through the newly installed class IV impact resistant roof.

With the exterior stone nearly complete, they moved on to the exterior stucco finish in late April. There was a lot of prep work to wrap the house in paper and lathe and create the stucco trim elements around the rear of the house. It wasn’t easy with all of the towering scaffolding required due to the steep lot. We did suffer one setback with a broken window in the master bedroom from some of the scaffolding, but it was replaced pretty easily.

Once the prep work was complete, the multiple coats of stucco went on pretty quickly. The top coat held our chosen color additive to give our home a nice green hue that blends in to our surrounding forest. We used two complimentary colors of green, one for the main level and another for the lower level to add a little more contrast to the rear of the house.

Stucco certainly wasn’t our first choice for the exterior finish of our house. We fought against it the whole way, preferring a more rustic aged barnwood appearance, but with soaring costs and the ongoing maintenance required for a wood finish, we relented and went with stucco. In the end, it really looks good with the rest of our materials and it will require much less maintenance over time, so it was probably a wise choice.

The masons worked around the interior crews and their own work on the exterior to finish the stone for the great room fireplace and kitchen hearth. They also manged to complete the overgrouted brick in the master bathroom shortly after the tile installation was completed. All of their work looks great, but it did take until the beginning of June to get it all buttoned up.

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