A while back I showed y'all what the exterior of our house looked like when we bought it. It's been a super slow process of updating it from "crack house" to "cute house" (we've been busy with this, this, and most importantly, THIS) but we're slowly catching the exterior improvements up with all the interior work we've already done.
If the differences between those two pictures aren't blatantly obvious, I'll just go ahead and point them out. The lawn is about a million times nicer than it used to be. It was basically a crab grass infested dust bowl for longer than I'd like to admit. We also replaced the front door with a real wood door. The original was basically made of cardboard and paper mache. Mitch painted the security door a glossy black that brought it back to life. It's still a security door, which I'm not a huge fan of, but it's completely necessary during the summer months here in SoCal. Our house (like the majority of houses in our city) doesn't have A/C which means we have to open up our houses to catch a cool breeze while still keeping our little nuggets and pups safely indoors and not roaming the neighborhood looking for cats to torture (Gus AND Charlie, that is). We tamed that wonky bush underneath the living room window. Yanked out those ugly 'fire' trees (woot)!! And started a little garden.
If you haven't been around here very long, this is what it looked like after the boys destroyed those hideously ugly fire trees.
I'm sorry. Seeing that picture still makes me cringe.
We still have a looooong ways to go. We're dying to get rid of that nasty flesh tone gutter and those boring beige walls. Plus we still need to add in the brick planter for the garden, plant some taller pieces to hide the cable and phone wires over there on the right corner of the house, and fill in the bare spots with more greenery and flowers. I'd love to add some shutters or thick molding to the windows to make them pop. And someday I'll hopefully be able to convince Mitch that gutter drains don't belong right.smack.dab.next.to.a window.
You may have noticed in the "progress" picture that we switched out the lights. They were originally a faux copper-ish color. It looked like this on the box....
Nice huh?
But it looked like this in real life. (see below) Lowes lies! Well, not Lowes. Whoever makes the light lies. So we painted them.
And there's the before and after for ya.
Have any of y'all replaced any lighting lately? Anyone else get lied to by the picture on the box?





3 comments:
What a lovely transformation! The first thing I noticed was the grass! How did you get it to look so perfect?? Our yard is grass challenged-living in GA we have more sand than dirt!
And I love, love, love those lights!
Wow, the original looked like a nice bronze. I too have been betrayed by product photos. But it looks great now!
@Sarah we rototilled our yard and then seeded it multiples times. each time we seeded we tossed top soil over the seed and watered the heck out of it. Once the new seeds grew in we'd seed it again. The more grass you have, the denser the grass will look which makes it look greener. We must've seeded it 5 times already (using one big bag). We still have some thin/bare spots, but it's a huge improvement from where it was! I'm sure our neighbors were shaking their heads every time they passed our house when it was just a big dust bowl. Now our yard is one of the nicer/greener ones on the block....finally!
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