The exterior was dark and outdated, the landscaping was overgrown, and the roof was stained and needed to be replaced, but it had so much potential! Here’s the before:

And the after:

It was a lot of work to get to the after - here’s everything we did to the exterior.

PS I love that Mike, Leo, and I pop up randomly in some of the photos below. It’s like an “I spy!”.

DEMOLISHED EXISTING LANDSCAPING

The first thing we did was pull out most of the landscaping. My brother owns a pool company and has lots of large equipment. We frequently barter with each other - we help him and he helps us. We had him come over with an excavator and start pulling!

Here it is as a blank slate with no landscaping. Already looking better!

The house sits on a double lot and is over an acre in total. We didn’t have to do much to the backyard. It has beautiful mature trees and a creek running through it. Here it is today:

ADDED A WINDOW

The next thing we did was part of the attic renovation. We wanted a big window in the attic bathroom, which is on the back side of the house. We removed the siding to prepare for installing the window.

INSTALLED A NEW FRONT DOOR

Next we replaced the front door. It was a nice solid wood door, but it didn’t match the aesthetic we were going for so ultimately we decided to replace it. Here’s the inside and outside of the door before we replaced it, and the new door right after we installed it.

Here’s the after picture of the front door once we got it all painted and pretty:

REBUILT THE CHIMNEY

We had the chimney inspected because it looked like it was in rough shape. The bricks were deteriorating and even missing in a couple of spots. We were told the top third of it needed to be torn down and totally rebuilt. Not the best news, but happy to get it fixed.

PAINTED THE EXTERIOR AND REPLACED THE ROOF

Next we got the house painted! Paint is such a hard decision! It looks different in the morning vs. evening, on the north side of the house vs the south side, from different angles, etc. And it’s a massive and costly mistake if you choose the wrong color. I narrowed it down to a few options and then agonized over the decision. The house looked pretty ridiculous with paint samples all over it for a couple of weeks, as shown below, ha!

I ended up going with SW Natural Choice for the main body, BM Briarwood for the shutters and trim, and BM Kendall Charcoal for the two front doors.

You can see in the picture above that the roof looks much cleaner. We actually paid 1k to have it cleaned, which turned out great. However, a hail storm came through not long after and we ended up getting the entire roof replaced. So we wasted some money on the cleaning, but the old roof was nearing the end of it’s life so we were thrilled to have it replaced.

Here’s the house right after paint, landscaping, and the new roof was installed.

INSTALLED NEW EXTERIOR LIGHT FIXTURES

We replaced all of the old light fixtures and the post light in the front yard with new, updated fixtures.

DEMOLISHED AND REPLACED THE BACK DECK

Next, we replaced the deck out back. It was just standard, pressure treated wood but was in bad shape. We knew we wanted to replace it, so we had it torn out at the same time the rest of the house was being demo’ed. Here’s what it looked like before:

We installed TimberTech composite decking and TimberTech black railings. A major improvement!

UPDATED THE SCREENED-IN PORCH

Besides paint, we replaced the light fixture, all of the screens, and the door and door hardware. I don’t have a great before picture, but here’s the after: