{House}: Exterior Renovation Plans.

One of our house goals since we moved in was to make over the front of our house. I affectionally tell people that our house is a pre-teen wearing braces. I've recently learned that our house is a "post-war cottage early ranch" style house with a hipped roof. The front of the house is rancher in style and doesn't exactly blend in to our street of bungalows here in Midtown Memphis.

I've been blogging off and on about our journey to renovate the exterior of the house (follow it here). We started off with this...

Our first step was to remove the giant boxwoods that had been well-maintained by the previous owner but botched by us when we tried to trim them. We actually put them for free on Craig's List and the couple that came to get them took them out for us. We also have been treating the yard because the weeds were crazy (the house next door is a rental so there are weeds all in the yard that spread over here).

So at Phase One, things were looking a little better there for a bit. We had new azaleas, green grass...

But then the front of our porch started falling apart. In addition, we had wanted to get rid of the door and window in favor of something more historic looking. In fact, our big window was single-paneled and old so it was drafty and at risk of breaking from the dogs jumping up.

So for Phase Two, we got a new window and door, found a fun retro glider, and felt a little better about the exterior...

And that is where we left off. So now we're to Phase Three. We have asked our contractor to give us an estimate for the porch repairs and boxing in the columns/changing the railing. His idea was to take the decorative scroll out of the railing (cut it out) and keep it black to match our gate. So we would have white posts and black rails, sort of like this porch inspiration I saved on my computer back in the day from the site Urban Nest:

In addition, I'm toying with the idea of getting him to add window boxes under our left windows. I'm thinking they would be the bright yellow of the glider but look like these from HGTV's website:

I think it would be fun to have a pop of yellow on that side of the house to balance the glider and our bushes are still so low since they are only two years old so it would fill in the space.

We're excited to be making forward progress on the exterior of the house. It may be a slow crawl, but it is progress!

In removing wrought iron,