Focusing Outside!

Since spring is among many of us I can't help but to want to focus on the great outdoors a bit.  There is a lot of outdoor maintenance and curb appeal sprucing up going on around our current abode but I am going to flashback to our first house again for the next couple of posts.  

I mentioned in this post how the hubby wasn't necessarily thinking that he just had to have this house when we went for our first look.  I can't imagine why??!

Doesn't this front porch just reach out and pull you in?  Now granted this could have been a lot worse and the very fact that we had the opportunity to own a home in our financial situation at the time was an awesome blessing!  Oh but I couldn't wait to get my hands on this little entry that would greet us home from work on a daily basis.  I am weird like this but I like to be greeted by a tidy home that smells good and makes you feel like sticking around for a while.
So to start we had to get rid of a few things like:
 The nice little ceramic kitty welcoming you in or warning you to stay away(depending on how you feel about cats that is).
The metal screen/storm door thingy..I think you can totally pull off a screen door in a classy, cool, or funky kind of way depending on the house and/or the neighborhood but this one just took away from what I think should be a welcoming and really functional(it was awkward and noisy) part of the home.
And....
See that blue post towards the front...this really dated the house and looked like a big turned leg from a piece of furniture in the 80's...unfortunately it couldn't be removed so we had to work with it.

Oh and the blue...For the longest time blue was one of my least favorite colors(if you look through any of my more recent posts you will see I am now a fan of many blues) so we started the whole exterior transformation with lots and lots of exterior paint, gallons of sweat , and some major paint spills from the tops of ladders(we still have evidence of two gallons of paint that were uh dropped and splattered on some of our planters)

After the major paint overhaul of the entire house

 we could focus on the smaller details like adding wood around the column to make it look more substantial and just update it period. We also added some funky fun house #'s that really made a big difference in the look/feel of the whole porch as far as I'm concerned.  We loved the look and feel of all the older smaller homes in central Austin but they were about 5 x the cost so we had to come up with ways to make it "feel" like a cool little bungalow instead.  Isn't it crazy what some house #'s can do?  If you think about it I bet that is one of the things that changes the whole look and feel of the curb appeal and I bet it is overlooked a lot.  Oh and the options out there these days are awesome.  These were just some cheapy home depot #'s but they worked.

 So in the picture above the big changes were of course as mentioned the column, paint, house #'s and the blinds.  The blinds actually lightened the porch up a bit and made it look more finished..and obviously had some function too.

In this next picture you can see that we had stained the porch and the whole sidewalk leading up to it.  We ended up using WOOD STAIN because that is what we had on hand and the real acid etching stuff wasn't in our budget at the time.  It held up really well!  I will say we did this at our current home on the back porch and it isn't holding up as well?  Not sure why? This change helped so much and was one of the best things we did for the whole "warm up" of the front of the house.  Stained concrete can really finish off a space because it takes away that cold gray look.  We also painted the front door black, added some new door hardware, and of course the landscaping changed a ton..It was actually a bit out of control in this picture..We couldn't get a handle on that lavender that wanted to grow right into path leading up to the door but if your going to trip on something it might as well be something that freshens the air as you fall to the ground right?

 And here is a pic of it from a little further away..I think we warmed it up a bit and brought out its "welcoming potential" don't you?

Linking to:

Houseography