We’ve knocked out two more projects on the left side of the house this past week!  This was the side of the house that had been most neglected over the years.  Even though it does face a street (our house is on a “peninsula” lot), it’s not a side of the house we see very often.  It’s opposite the garage, driveway, and side entrance of the house; you don’t see it at all from the backyard because of the fence, and you only get a peek of it from the front.  It’s been a little out of sight, out of mind for us, and I think that was the case for the previous homeowner as well.  What was once a lovely abelia hedge framing a lilac tree was completely overgrown and overrun with weeds and English ivy.  Because of the landscape tangle, the brick hadn’t been cleaned in years, and the trim hadn’t been painted.  Even though we gave the exterior trim on the other sides of the house a fresh coat of paint, we could tell it had been repainted at some point.  The trim on this side of the house, particularly the gable, almost looked like a different color, and it was chipping more than any other section of trim.

So, the projects that have been ticked off the list are removing the lilac and painting the trim and vent on the gable.  We hired out the painting so we didn’t have to get up on ladders. While there was a crew out painting this gable, we had them paint the one on the back side of the house, too. As a reminder, this is how the left side of the house looked earlier this year…

Here is how it looked in late spring, just as I was starting to weed and pull the ivy.  We had already trimmed back the abelia hedge, though.  You can see how dingy the paint on the gable looks and how chippy it is on the attic vent.

And here is how it looks now…

The trim is freshly painted in a bright white, which looks so much better.  The new windows have more presence than the old ones and visually brightened up this side of the house.  I’ve been working on weeding and pulling the English ivy, and I’m almost done with that!  Two more weeding sessions and it will be done.  And, Jeff cut the lilac tree down to a stump.  We were just going to prune it hard, but as we started cutting it back, it was clear the entire thing needed to come down.  Much of it was dead, and it was infested with ivy.  It needs a fresh start and, based on what I’ve read, I’m expecting new growth to come from the stump.

Here’s to show that so many of the large branches were already hollow inside or were so brittle that I was able to pull them off.

While I was in Minnesota, Jeff cut back the holly bush (on the far left of the picture before) so we could access the rest of the back corner of the house to clean up the ivy and power wash.  The bush was overgrown, anyway, and will benefit from the hard pruning.  He also worked on power washing the brick, so I’ll have to take some updated photos once it’s all cleaned.  I’m going to have to spend some time working on the ivy roots with a scraper and brush (the method is shared in THIS POST)

We’re going to prune the abelia bushes a bit more carefully over the winter to thin them out and give them more shape.

The gable along the back side of the house still needed a fresh coat of paint, but it wasn’t as bad.  The vent was stained, though, and it looked unsightly.

Now, with the new windows, window panels, and freshly-painted trim, it’s looking so good!  Next up for this wall is new shutters.  I hope we’ll get to that in the next couple of weeks.  It’s been on the to-do list for weeks, but it keeps getting bumped back.  I already have them painted, so it should be a reasonably easy project.

You can find more posts about the exterior work we’ve done on this 1970s ranch house HERE.