{House}: Better After Feature Post!

One of the first blogs that I started following was "Better After," which features (get this...) better afters. Lindsey from BA highlights before and after pictures of all sorts of things - kitchens, sofas, houses, etc. The posts are always inspirational and fun.

When we renovated our kitchen, I submitted it to Lindsey with no idea that she'd actually post it - when I saw my own pictures as the daily blog post, you would have thought I was cast in a Hollywood movie - I felt like a celebrity!! It was so fun. Here's that post (she reposted as one of her favorites recently: http://www.betterafter.net/2013/07/yellow-fever-take-2.html#comments)

A few weeks ago, Lindsey featured my exterior renovation on her site. She highlighted our exterior before and after: http://www.betterafter.net/2013/11/killer-pillars.html#comment-48440

It has been so fun going room by room through our house, fixing it up and honoring its history and structure. Next up? time to tackle the den!

In blog features,

{House}: Exterior Renovation - Done!

After thinking, dreaming, and planning from the moment we saw our house for the first time, we are finally making the big change I've been wanting - getting rid of the wrought iron!

I've been blogging about this plan for the distant future for some time. In 2010 I came up with a "mood board" (those were so hot then) and later that year drew an idea of what I wanted in my head.

For reference, here's what we started with - the MLS listing picture of our dear house:

The next spring we went crazy and tore out the boxwoods, which had grown unruly and I had accidentally killed a patch of when trying to prune. We added in azaleas, which were smaller and easier to manage:

All was fine until hell started breaking loose in the form of porch tiles:

Let's talk about how attractive that looked for several years. Our neighbors surely loved us.

Finally last year we initiated stage one of the porch project, a new door and window:

And finally this summer we moved forward with the rest of the porch project. First our contractor addressed the porch tiles, which were falling off the stairs because of a problem with water drainage.

Also on the agenda was taking the decorative part of the wrought iron railing out because we intended to keep the railing...

So here's the house one more time on the day the big project kicked off:

They sanded down the railing to be able to repaint it and took out all the decorative parts of the railing:

They also took the vinyl siding off the porch, revealing in tact wood siding.

They took all the tiles off the stairs in order to fix the stairs - the stairs were sinking from water drainage and need to be fixed to drain forward not backward:

All was chugging along well until we hit a road block: the plan was to wrap the existing wrought iron to create columns. It seemed like a good thing to do. In theory....

And then I came home to that. A 12 inch wide column. That looked awful. Awful. I had to squash that plan and move on to an alternate one with the contractor. We ended up taking out the wrought iron and putting in 4X4 posts to wrap around, creating a 7.5 inch column. We actually measured several in Jake's parents neighborhood to find out the proper width for our style house.

Here are the 4X4 posts going in:

And the above picture is also the moment when we decided to ditch the rails - see the left versus the right? Doesn't the right seem so open?

Moving forward, the next step was to pick paint colors - here they are:

Top left: Modern Gray, Bottom left: Popular Gray, Top Right: Amazing Gray, Bottom Right: Worldly Gray, all by Sherwin Williams

Here are the paint samples on the siding standing at the street, also with the new columns going in:

I was worried about going too dark but the darkest, Amazing Gray, was actually not dark from afar. We used Bright White (the base white for Sherwin Williams) for the trim.

At the last minute we decided to paint the ceiling of the porch light blue (Rainwashed by Sherwin Williams). Here are the paint colors once the painter finished:

I love that the Amazing Gray color coordinates with the brick mortar.

And of course we had to get a new door mat, from Target:

So with paint, new columns, and no rails, here is the finished product:

Here's the finished stairs, which are made out of Trex decking material and will fare much better than the sinking concrete stairs:

We also got a porch swing, a Polywood swing from Amazon.

And for the sake of comparison, here is the before and after from the same angle:

October 2009 -

August 2013 -

Finally! Here's to making our little ranch on a street of bungalows have a little more character and fit into the neighborhood a little more.

In columns and porch swings,

{Exterior}: Azaleas in the Backyard.

I by no means have a green thumb. Our backyard is a great size but the soil is compacted from the dogs so grass isn't growing (we're on that... appointment with lawn service made) and we had this pesky bed by the garage that turned into a weed garden. One day after it rained quite a bit we took shovel to the bed and ripped out all of the weeds (some of which were small trees). We were left with this...

Then we headed out to Dabney Nursery to get some azaleas to fill in the bed. We got our last azaleas there and they have done well so we wanted to get them there again. Plus they have a huge selection at great prices and are very helpful! {not a commercial, just satisfied!}

After exploring their stock we chose the Conversation Piece azalea because of its height, bloom color, and the leaf pattern.

We loaded four into our cart and headed for the register.

Then my sweet guy used some of his free time to plant them in the ground - we ended up having to wait about a week because right after we bought these we had a cold snap with temps below freezing so our azaleas lived inside for a little bit.

We finally got them mulched this weekend. In the meantime they have bloomed somewhat. Unfortunately Harley thinks she is supposed to eat the blooms so we've been dealing with trying to keep her from killing them.

Now the side of the garage looks a bit better. If only we could get some grass...

In gardens and blooms,

{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,

{House}: Shut the Front Door.

Have you heard people saying "shut the front door" as a phrase for "no way" or "get out of here" lately? I have and I think it is hilarious. So when thinking of what to title my post about our front door, I naturally thought "shut the front door!"

With that out of the way, the real story is that we stained our front door. It was touch and go there for a little while, not sure what to do, paralyzed by indecision. As you may recall, we were playing the "stain or paint" game.

Here's what we were working with before, unfinished:

Finally I decided to stain the door, thinking that if I didn't like it, I could always paint over stain but not stain over paint. So on a whim one Sunday I decided to get my stain on. This involved hitting up my favorite Midtown Home Depot:

The first thing we did was take all the hardware off the door. Jake assured me he knew how to put it back on... but it was a bit scary to think about what would happen if he couldn't.

After taking the jewelry off my pretty door, I sanded it with a fine sandpaper and then used tack cloths to get the dust off. Key step. My mom says so.

After that I used a clean (old) t-shirt to apply pre-stain conditioner. You definitely want to use pre-stain conditioner. It makes everything even and happy.

Then it was finally time to be ready for the stain. I used more pieces of the t-shirt to apply the stain. One for putting the stain on, one for rubbing the extra off. This was one and a half coats into the process:

And this was after 3 coats and a layer of poly (put on with a foam brush):

At that point we had to leave the house to go see Skyfall (ridiculously awesome in case you were wondering) so we didn't touch the back of the door. And Jake got to put his claims to the test in doubletime as he put the door back together on a deadline:

So about 2 hours, one t-shirt, a can of stain, and some extremely messy hands later, I had a stained front door.

Not going to lie, I was freaking out for a bit. Thought I messed it up. Thought it looked streaky, too dark, like a hot mess.

Now, a few weeks later, I'm pretty much digging it. I still need to do the other side but I think I'm going to keep it stained not painted. We've got enough color in the accessories and I like the idea of the stain.

And I know I say this after every outside improvement, but now that the door is stained, the chipped front porch and the wrought iron are REALLY bothering me. #can'twaittofixthat #spendingtoomuchtimeoninstagramandtwitter #whatyoudon'ttalkinhashtags?

Time to gather enough energy to finish the back of the door!

In stain and home improvement,