Curb Appeal

This is our house.

That picture was taken from last summer. (When things were a little greener). It's nothing too special..But a couple of years ago, it looked like this:

Aside from the change of season, hopefully you can see a few improvements since then. If not, allow me to point them out to you. Since we started, back in 2010, here's the changes we've made to the appearance of the front:

1. We chopped down those 2 huge, overgrown bushes in front and planted two small dwarf bushes in their place. For one, they were an eyesore. They also made the house look smaller, like they were hiding behind those things!

2. We gave the shutters a nice new shiny coat of paint. They were seriously faded and dull-looking before, and with some new paint, they suddenly popped!

3. We did some landscaping. Since it was lacking any legit landscaping (dead flowers and large rocks don't count), we planted some flowers and put down some mulch out there.

4. We removed the stump you see closer to the foreground and planted new grass in its place.

5. We replaced the house numbers with some snazzier ones.

6. We replaced the porch light from a dated motion-sensor light to a new, modern one.

Even before that "before" picture above though - it was even worse. Before I even moved in, we made some improvements to the porch, including ripping out the ugly black carpet that was there, and painting the bare concrete underneath. It never had a railing, either. Just some lattice thrown up there. Ya know, the usual. So Trent actually built a new railing out of some thin boards laying around, and we painted it bright white. It turned out pretty darn good, if I do say so myself! Here are some pictures from back in 2010 when Trent was tearing the old carpet out and building the porch rail:

This was the black carpet that was on the porch:

Trent replaced a couple of the posts with brand new ones. Here it is in-progress:

And here's the porch railing being built:

Below is the bench that was already there, and we painted white:

 

Assembled - Before paint

Huge improvement, right? And the stump in front of the house? It was actually what we dubbed the "chair stump." As in, it had been carved into a chair. Let's just say..not my style. ha.

Here's Trent watching that baby burn:

Yep, we're real classy around here, burning chair stumps and all. It took a couple of years until it was finally soft enough and buried deep enough to plant grass seed over, so we finally did that last summer.

A couple of smaller improvements we made were replacing the porch light and house numbers with nicer looking ones.

Here's the Before and After of our house number makeover:

And here's the porch light Before....

While Trent was installing the new one....

And the new light:

And even though we've made some improvements over the last couple of years, there's still some work to be done. Still on our "curb appeal" to-do list is:

1. A new roof

2. A smaller, more modern chimney

3. Somehow get the power lines redirected so they don't come right down onto the porch.

4. A more appealing front door (once the foundation is fixed..right now we have trouble even opening it all the way!)

So that's our list for the front exterior of the house as it stands now. I guess you could say this is one of our least problematic areas right now. We have much worse-off spaces around this house! But that's for another time!