You can go home again, but no one said it was EASY!

Thomas Wolfe, a North Carolinian, as I am, wrote a beautiful book called, "You Can't Go Home Again".  While that may be true in the sense of returning to a time of childhood which is held, now, only in a time capsule of memory, you actually can still return to your home, ... and with a generous permission from my brother after my step-mother's decision to move to a retirement home, I am moving back into the house in which I grew up.  

This photo was taken on a foggy morning several months after the process of re-claiming my one-time home had begun. In this photo, I had already changed the outdoor lights and painted the trim band on the shutters and doors.  The large trees in the front yard got a banding of pavers to give them a more 'finished' look.  I am doing the work myself whenever possible, and since my friends and family have heard months of agonizing about my DYI trials and tribulations, I decided to do a blog and record some of my "adventures".

A much needed new roof was put on before I knew that I would move back into the house.
Here's the old roof with the small eco-system that was developing there.


 Had I known that I would get to move back into the house when making the selection of shingles, I would have chosen differently.  But, the roof is there and is fine.   The shingles, which proved to be a slightly different color in reality from the way the samples looked, led me to decide that I would paint the trim on the shutters and highlight the doors to give the house a stronger relationship to the roof color.

I used a Sherwin-Williams shade called "Mink" to add to the already existing dark green of the shutters.  Many, many years ago, my Father decided to put siding on the house.  A decision I understand, but regret.  However, for the time being (and possibly forever!) the siding will remain as is.

Other changes occurred over the years.  The driveway still ends at what was in the beginning a garage.  Years ago, this was turned into a bedroom for my Dad when my Grandmother, Gagee, came to live with the family and help with my brother and myself after the death of my Mother.  So the garage became a bedroom, and the screened porch (breeze-way as we called it in the 50's) became a den.  In the 60's, after a visit to my cousin Dottie's house in Florida, I begged my Dad to turn the small back porch off the kitchen into a "Florida Room".  I had been enchanted with this idea upon seeing these rooms which were all louvered windows and allowed the outside in but kept mosquitos out!  Daddy was generous and agreed to let me create it.  When my father re-married, he decided to turn the master bedroom and the youngest child bedroom, which were next to each other, into a master suite with a bath.  Those are the only changes made to the original structure of the house which was built in 1949.