fencing, it turns out, is crazy expensive. we really wanted nice metal gates, but holy goodness… there is no way we could ever afford to drop that kind of cash. so we looked into loads of different options and man, the majority of those options are just ball sucking lame.

plastic fence? please!  that stuff cracks and breaks like geriatric hip on concrete. vinyl? can you say totally bogus? yeah it’s easy to clean and wipe off but not all that sturdy nor is it’s appearance anything noteworthy. chain link? pah-lease. i may be broke and living on the cheap, but i ain’t that ghetto. there is no way you can make chain link look pretty. anything you can do to pretty it up makes it look even more sad. picket fence? as american as a flat top hair do on a blond dude with a giant gun. we’re so there.

looking at styles, we rather like the look of the french gothic, nice point and shape and the spacing isn’t large enough for our tiny dogs to run out through.

knowing what we want,  we started to attempt to closely find and compare prices. home depot and lowes are the options for pre-made sections and their price difference is a buck, can’t you believe that? also, can you believe that NEITHER ONE has fricking gates? that makes NO sense to me! none! what-so-ever! who wants to fence in a yard and have no option of leaving besides a running jump like a hurdle in the olympics? seriously.

so, we picked the style, figured what is cheaper (lowes is a dollar cheaper and 20 minutes closer), narrowed down the stain options (guess what! it’s grey! fancy that. man, he’s so predictable at times) now how much of the yard do we want to fence off? oh that’s a tricky question there. we can’t afford the footage to fence in the whole she-bang, so we have to be kind of selective of where. seeing as we’re not exactly sure just yet, here is a proposed  sketch of our yard and what i’m thinking:

this is the Der Fraken Haus yard.

• red: estimated yard lines
• white: where the picket fence could possibly lie
• blue line: handmade fencing or wall on the back patio
• thicker lines: gates
• light blue box w/lines: my studio
• blue boxes with x’s: where i might build raised beds.

flower beds inside the yard will be with flowers and foliage. flowerbeds outside the picket fence will be food (so the dogs don’t get into them).

maybe when i get home today i will go out and measure how much we might possibly need and figure out how to  block off the treeline so the dogs don’t get stuck in it (loads of poison oak back there i must kill as well).

more tomorrow on what else we’ll be doing with our measly stimulus check and cross your fingers w can stretch the finds as far as we hope!

when we learned of this amazing awesomeness (thanks to a tip from my friend Cat who sent me  the news articles to prove to the account this in fact was true and going to happen), steel rod and i made it clear that that money was going right back into the house, that way we instantly increase the value of the house the first year we own it by at LEAST 10%.

so where did we want to spend the money on the house? oddly enough, we decided on the outside. we have two small dogs who want to go out and be outside more often, so we decided we wanted fencing… then we ran with it and decided to overhaul as much of the outside as possible.

steven is a bit of an odd fellow.  he’s really surprising when it comes to what he likes in manners of home decor as opposed to what he’s like in personality and personal appearance, not to mention hobbies and lifestyle. the fact the house is actually legally his and i just live with him (and am pretty much his life partner), i outright asked him what he wanted. he said he wanted a grey house. we had that as a start. being a creative person we just bounced ideas off each other until it grew and we had something to work with mentally in our mind.

the end result of our excited conversation about what to make the house look like outside? in steel rod’s words “the addams family country home“.

okay, it'll never look like it, but we can try to get the feel!

yes, my boyfriend loves gothic architecture and look and writing, but not the subculture lifestyle. i know this because the majority of my twenties was spent in and out of goth clubs and such. he likes the aesthetic appeal of the actual literature and time frame of that writing style, but from a point of view of somebody who does something besides sit in a corner, wear black, and whine. so i was floored when he came up with this suggestion. he’ s not a vampire, he’s a vampire hunter.

since we bought a piss yellow ranch house with shit brown trim (in varying shades of piss and shit, as they kept running out of colors and even going so far as to not completely finish the painting the job in the back) with vertical metal siding, there isn’t much we can afford to do but paint it until we can afford the siding we actually do want. steven wants to paint  the main body of the house a shade of light grey. have the trim in a darker grey. black accents all over the place. sadly the house has orange shingles and we wonder if it would be bad to paint those black.

what would be like if we could afford it? our house with horizontal clapboard like appearance. still in varying colors of grey from light to dark with black accents. stone accents on some walls. or maybe grey brick look?

so this weekend we went to Lowes and picked out some colors he likes. the boy is going pretty dark in his color scheme.

these are olmypic paint colors: dover grey, knight’s armor, black magic. i am trying to convince him he should paint the majority of the house dover grey, accent 1 being knight’s armor and accent two being black magic. he wants to totally skip over dover grey.  he’s going straight to the dark stuff. oh, my boyfriend. it’s his house, he can do whatever he wants.

now that paint colors have been picked out, we think we have a painter in mind. we just have to get an estimate and cross our fingers it’s something we can afford with all the other stuff we want to do. so little cash, so much we want done.

here’s to hoping!