" You know I'm not a big fan of painting over masonry surfaces, but our back beside here on the coach house was really a mess and paintings are the best thing to do to it. We had traces of old paint. That paint that you see up there as well as patches that didn't quite match the old brick 'cause we couldn't get enough bricks; so the best thing to do is to use a masonry paint, which will allow the surface to breath and, you know, it can be renewed quite easily in a few years if it has to be. The best thing to do with masonry though is to leave it alone, and on the side of the house, we have the old golden Chicago brick. We did a nice patch here where they used to be a door into the house. This is the garage and we wanted to have it secure. We got another patch here where there was a window, and most of this golden brick could have been cleaned, but, you know, why go to the expense. The main thing is it's in good condition. It didn't need repointing. And also the windows that were here, we've put in brand new windows on the side for our bedroom that's there and then up on the front of the house, we have, you know, spent a little bit more time and thinking in terms of our color scheme, which shows to go with this sandstone color. It's kind of a buff because it is of course reminiscent of a masonry effect, and we patched the old brick as best as we could. The green, which is kind of a hunter green or a forest green, I think is a very, very good combination to use with buff. It's one of my favorite color combinations. The white vinyl windows kind of set everything up. It's kind of a crisp look and this of course looks very nicely done in the green as well. Now, the landscape is pretty limited when you're just talking about an area that's basically 10 feet by about 25, and remember you're not getting a lot of sun here because you've got the 2 buildings so close together, and the building over here is a tall one. So, what we did was we minimized the amount of actual planting that was gonna take place, which shows a red bud tree, which is right now just about 8 feet high and getting ready to bloom pretty soon, but the red bud can stand the cold cold Chicago winters and will grow to be about 30 feet high, which will be a beautiful feature to have in this little urban yard. The rest of the area has been done very simply with very inexpensive materials. These are just cement pavers. They probably cost about $12 a piece, and then of course we've laid them in the path so that they both relate to the back entrance to the 2 flat as well as to the little coach house. The other material which I like a lot is this river stone, which is crunchy under foot. Again, it has that tawny color, which blends in well with the earth stones of the house, and it's absolutely no maintenance. Rainwater will percolate easily through here and the idea is that you can bring out a couple of chairs and a table in nice weather and have lunch out here and put them back away when you're done, or you can fill the area with flowering, you know, annuals and stuff, and we brought the pavers along over to this corner and, you know, created a new kind of grand entrance for the little coach house. It's always fun to look at the album when you're getting close to finishing a project like this, and look at what it once was liked. This was really something else where it hasn't been lived in in 10 years. It really had terrible front steps. They were rotting away. The front doors were double wooden doors that were padlocked and in bad shape and, of course, the main problem the house had was that someone had painted it with brown enamel years ago so that you had hunks of brown paint just peeling off of it. Remember, hard to forget."

" Oh! The whole front would"

" I think what we have here is [unk]."

" Why?"

" The demolition guy was getting this."

" Nice surprise, huh?"

" So, you've got it the whole thing down, nothing away. Nothing left with the bare brick walls. "

" Let's see."

" That's [unk]."

" Well, it goes to show that you can do a lot to an old Victorian house like this if you find the right craftsmen, and we've been very lucky here in Chicago. Everyone from the iron workers to the painters, not to mention the carpenters, and you can take some liberties with the Victorian. We have done this color scheme, but we've also kind of gotten rid of the old feeling of the Victorian doors and put in a very contemporary glass door setup."