Tag: exterior

Outside (May)

The last time I shared with you, dear readers, any glance of my home’s exterior was here, where I talked about grandiose backyard plans. We have made no progress on that front. Maybe on Memorial Day I will get a chance to go to Lowe’s and get prices for different kinds of decking and fencing. Then, with dollar estimates in hand, we can move forward.

The last time I touched on the front exterior was clear back in November, a few weeks after we’d painted the house an “oops” color. The color has grown on me since then. The fact that the yard is perking up and new plants in the flowerbed are doing well helps, too. Yesterday, after Doug had mowed the yard I stepped outside and got a good photo. The sunlight was pretty nice, too.

Mowing the lawn is something he loves doing, by the way, and does weekly. If it was my responsibility I would let it get scraggly and mow only every 2 weeks. Glad I’m not in charge of lawn care!

In March we planted seeds for poppies, zinnias, and cosmos. Two of our flowers have bloomed! I hope we get to see lots more flowers before we head off for our vacation in a few weeks. What I don’t want is for the flowers to all pop out while we’re gone and wilt before we get back!

Speaking of plants, the above photo does not do it justice. The plant we have in the little front door alcove is just about the most beautiful plant ever. And, according to my MIL, near impossible to kill, too! Anyone know what it’s called?

What I’d like to do ideally is to tie in the terra cotta roof tiles somehow. The house color, shutter color, and roof color do seem to play nicely together, but I want to work in more of that orangey red. Seeing how nicely the flowerbed is coming in (the poppies are kind of going overboard, in fact) doesn’t leave a lot of room for terra cotta potted plants, which would be the easiest thing to do. So any suggestions are welcome!

PS: It’s clear that I should stop editing photos on my laptop. I thought the pictures looked fantastic until I came back to write the post on a different computer (one without a broken “shift” key,) and they look terribly green! Yuck! Live and learn, right? It’s always something…….

PPS: Ashley at Any Lovely Thing has given me a Liebster award! More on that in a couple of days.

A New Winter Coat

A new winter coat… of PAINT, that is, on the outside of the WHOLE house.

It’s a long story. Get your cup of coffee ready. When we last spoke of the outside of the house, it looked like this:

Pink-ish with burgundy-ish shutters. Classic southwest. The master plan was to patch some of the more heinous cracks in the stucco, do a little touch-up paint here and there, and paint the shutters turquoise (turquoise and pink adobe is one of my favorite combinations).  Now, something happened between a month ago (pictured here) and last Saturday (see below):

Yes, the lawn looked healthier in the first photo but the temperature has done a 180 since then. And we planted some dinky little plants and made a flowerbed. Fall is here, my friends. Oh, you mean you noticed something else. Like, the whole house is a completely different color! It is now some kind of light beige-tan. Decidedly not pink adobe. Let me explain. A chunk of stucco had been taken to Lowe’s to get the match so we could just do touch-up on the stucco repair, but evidently the person at Lowe’s who was running the color match machine was either on some serious dope, or our 5-gallon bucket of paint got mixed with someone else’s. It really is a toss-up at this point. The fact of the matter is that we had our hands on a non-refundable 5 gallon bucket of the wrong color, so the consensus was just to go with it. Now, I’m not particularly fond of it compared with the previous color, but the truth of the matter is that the whole place (and garage) do look much, much nicer with a fresh, non-dirty coat of paint. And the nice thing was that the turquoise really does go well with it. So, what’s done is done.

Oh, but there’s more. We did the body of the house first (naturally). The majority of the work was done by Doug and his parents. I focused on the detail work, namely priming and painting the shutters. Using primer was a life-saver because (in one test location) the dark red zoomed right through the turquoise and looked ter-ri-ble. Yay for primer. Also, my MIL rolled all of the concrete porches with a special super-durable concrete paint and they just look fab. The dark brown is matched to our (new, functioning!) garage door which also helps pull things together.

I feel like I need an accent color going on here. Suggestions welcome. Also, I’m on the fence as far as what to do with the red exposed brick. I really like it, but it kind of stands out and feels really disconnected. Maybe the easiest/best thing to do would be to swap out the border edge (weird plaster rocks that were here when we moved in) and replace with a similar shade of red brick? That might look nice…. Oh, and one other detail to point out, I ORB’ed (the verb “ORB” is a DIY-blog buzzword for “painted with oil-rubbed bronze spray paint”) my mailbox and the outside light fixtures (you can see one of them in the wide shot on the right part of the house). They look good as new. Which is nice because the light fixtures were kind of rusty and falling-apart-y.

All in all, I am coming around to the new paint color. It helps that none of the old color is visible so I’m quickly forgetting what it used to look like.

One more thing, and I need the opinions of you, my readers on this one. I have the feeling that the place would look way good if I ORBed the gutters and drainpipes (carefully, so as not to get any paint on the new exterior or roof). I did a very amateur-looking mock-up in photoshop to see what it might look like. What do you think.

This:

or this:

Will it look hideous? or add some much-needed contrast and polish? Mind you, they’d be subtly metallic and match the mailbox and light fixtures. I think you know which side I’m on, but I will truly take into considerations any comments or suggestions.

Curb Appeal

I really like that phrase, although we don’t really have a curb… The idea conveyed still applies, however.

Our apartment’s hallway is really something out of a bad horror movie. A long, dark, creepy hallway complete with dim lighting, peeling paint, chunks missing from the wall(?!) and creaky floors. There isn’t much we can do about this, because the hallway’s sort of “no man’s land” between our lot and the lot to the south–is it owned by our landlord or the other landlord?

If only. Image via sugrdva on flickr.

Anyway, I’ve been spending some time brainstorming ways to improve our “curb appeal,” if you will, so that first-time visitors to our abode won’t turn and run before making it through the front door. Something above the level of regular sweeping (something my neighbors and I could work on, honestly).

What I’d like to try to do is create some kind of low, narrow unit that could sit to the left of the door, under the chair rail. I especially like the first part of this Before & After from design*sponge, where the reader DIY’ed a credenza from dresser drawers. I feel like I could make a nice one with a small drawer. This would be great because then the mail/UPS/fedex guy would have a little niche in which to slip a package, that wouldn’t scream “hey! there’s a package at this apartment and nobody’s home!” However, try as I might I have yet to come across the perfect drawer.

For now, I guess the best I can do is keep sweeping… :)