Outside: Then & Now

When I introduced my Our house: Then & Now series last week, I said I'd be doing it throughout the next few weeks. At this point, I'm going to amend that to say that I'll be doing about a post a week over the next several weeks, as that seems to be a realistic pace for me with the [tidying up the house and waiting for some good light for] photography, editing, and writing involved. 

This week I'll share with you what you'd see first if you were coming over our place for a visit: the exterior.

The Front:

You can't see it, but the garage door was the same dingy white color as the front door. We also got rid of that car, too.

Then: Dingy white front and garage door, muddled grey siding and shutters, gold accents galore, overgrown bushes.
Now: Red front and garage door, grey/brown shutters, "brushed nickel" accents, and trimmed bushes.

And if you're really good at those "what's different" picture puzzles, you may have noticed that there are no shadows from tree limbs across the front lawn and driveway in the 2013 picture, and that's because [despite our opposition] the city came and cut down our boulevard tree last month (LG watched, saying "bye bye tree" and "uh-oh" every time a branch fell). And if you also noticed that there are less branches in the upper right corner of the 2013 picture, you're right, and that's because we [begrudingly] had to have the big black walnut tree in our backyard removed in 2011.

 Front details:

One spring day in 2011, AD decided that he could no longer deal with the fact that some of the red pavers that made up our little porch were cracking apart and falling off around the edges. So he did what any man would do while his wife was out running errands: he started ripping out the porch. During the process, he determined that the pillar was decorative, not structural, so that got ripped out, too.

So we picked out some grey/brown pavers, and he redid the porch and extended the pavers down the drive and back over to the house to create a flowerbed where there used to be grass weeds and mud. It doesn't look super attractive in the picture below, but we have daffodils (thanks Aunt N & C!), tulips and grape hyacinth (from my Nana's house), creeping myrtle and hostas (thanks to the Dubs next door), and lavender. 

 

The Back:

Back details:

Then: Dingy grey aluminum siding with patches of mismatched paint, AC unit, satellite dish, wires everywhere.
Now: White vinyl siding, no AC unit or satellite dish, small fraction of the wires. Plus rain barrel, baby swing (thanks to AD's mom & dad), and playhouse (thanks abcDe!)

AD discovered last year that part of our roof needed some repairs that would require him to remove siding. So, AD and his dad fixed the roof, and AD did the siding on the entire second floor of the house. 

I have to say, there's probably no way we could have afforded some of these projects if AD wasn't such a handy guy and we had to pay a contractor to do it. 

I'll try to post some pictures of our backyard later in the season when everything is [hopefully] nice and green--not brown and yucky, as it is now.


Up Next: 
AD would like to do redo the roof in a dark grey architectural shingle.