Back when we first laid eyes our home in 2014 it already had that classic waterfront farm house feel we immediately fell in love with. From a distance it was lovely, but upon closer inspection, the exterior paint on the wood siding was a little worn and tired, the roof more green than we would have chosen, and the porch floor color and lighting choices were very different than what we wanted for the house. 

This summer we've been focusing on improving the curb appeal/making updates more to our taste for our home through a three step approach. 

1. Improving the existing garden/beds around the house
2. Addressing exterior paint issues
3. Overall porch projects and paint

After working through the first two major steps, our home is really starting to look great. The fresh paint is clean and crisp, the new roof color on our metal roof is much darker gray and less green, and the garden has really been coming into its own this summer.

With the first two steps complete, we turned our attention to our home's front porch. More specifically, we wanted to finish up some work that we started shortly after we bought the house, and make our front porch a welcoming sight for visitors.

When we started work the front door was home to two oversized brass light fixtures that were installed in the early 1990s. They were badly weathered from the salt air, were far too large for their location, and just didn't go with our general design aesthetic. 

As a result, the brass fixtures were retired in favor of two more traditional farmhouse lights for either side of our door.

With the lighting starting to look the part, I wanted to add some casual seating to set the tone for the porch. I started looking for a nice set of chairs that would look at home in this location and I happened upon the perfect pair when our neighbors offered us a pair of vintage chairs they'd found that weren't going to work for their yard. They needed some clean up, so to seal in the wonderful patina an afternoon of work to sand off the rust and grime and apply a coat of sealer made them ready for their new home outside.

The stairs leading up to the porch, as well as the porch floor, had also see better days. Peeling paint, splintered treads, rotten railings and floor boards, and missing sections of stairs required some pretty extensive fixes to make everything sound again. We repaired, removed, sealed, and corrected several issues before we could give it a fresh coat of paint. As usual, Lulu was largely bored by this whole process.

As we mentioned in our prior post about our paint color selection for the exterior of the house, we made a major misstep with our initial porch flooring color selection. The first color we chose, Sherwin Williams Chatroom, was just too gray green for the floor. Don't get me wrong, it was wonderful to get a coat of paint on this floor that I've disliked since day one, but the color was just a little bit off. 

After licking my wounds from our incorrect color choice, I swallowed my pride, bought a gallon of Sherwin Williams Dorian Gray, and began correcting our mistake. 

The new color was much more what we were hoping for. It's a true gray and one that will make the porch a much more calming space.

This color gray is far more in keeping with the general style of "casual waterfront farmhouse" that I'm going for with our new color palette.

With the porch repair and floor paint complete, it was time to start accessorizing this wonderful space. To add some color and life to the porch I wanted to add two potted plants to either side of the front door. On a trip to HomeGoods I found two large ceramic planters that I really liked.  

Keeping with the accessories finds theme, I also found a great deal on a couple clearance lanterns at Target.  

No porch makeover is complete without a welcome mat. As luck would have it, this Target doormat was not only on sale, but it also truly embodies the sentiment I'd like to embrace for all visitors to our home. 

A subsequent trip to HomeGoods turned up these adorable outdoor pillows (and a new boat print that will find a home somewhere inside). I loved the pattern as well as the tie in of the green and aqua.

With my accessories purchased, I excitedly started on the "fun" part of the front porch makeover. My excitement quickly waned when I realized the scale of the pillows was WAY off for the size of the chairs. It looks like the pillows tried to eat the chairs as if they were giant anacondas going after their next meal, and given my intense fear/dislike of snakes, anything that makes me think of these creatures is a no-go in my book. So back to HomeGoods they went. 

With my disappointment aside, I kept moving forward though, planting two new sedums in moisture max soil. My hope is that the right soil will help bridge the gap between waterings when we're at the house, but time will tell. I set them on either side of the door along with the chairs, mat, and lanterns. The gardening boots and four legged sidekick sure do look cute in the photos, but were also there to assist me in my efforts. 

I grabbed a throw pillow from inside to get a better idea of the size pillow I'll need for the chairs, and think a small lumbar pillow will work much better than the 22"x22" pillows I tried on the first attempt.

It's amazing how a few accessories can transform a space. I didn't realize how much warmer and inviting the porch would feel, especially with the addition of the plants.

I was also thinking ahead when it came to the lanterns. While I plan on moving them inside when not in use (to keep them clean, dry, and bug free), I also know how hot this porch gets in the afternoon sun. I didn't want wax candles to melt, so I purchased plastic LED flickering "candles" which will achieve the same look, be better suited to the hot temperatures, and will be safer to have than a lit candle on a staircase.

The final item we have yet to install is this new door knocker. 

We'll have to be a bit creative in hanging it as we don't want to drill more holes in the metal door, but Alex is working through a few solutions to that challenge.

While the look is on the simple side, that was intentional. I tried to be restrained as we didn't want the porch to look cluttered, and fewer items means fewer items to clean and maintain! 

Overall, I had a great time making over this small space. It's easy to get bogged down in the details of a larger scale renovation, and these are the types of projects that keep me energized and excited about what's to come!

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The most major of our projects has been our focus on the overall exterior appearance of our Foursquare. As a realtor, I'm keenly aware of curb appeal, and how small differences on the exterior of your home can truly set the tone for how you feel on the interior of your home. But as an owner of a house with wood siding, a large yard, and a lot of plantings around the house, I know what an overwhelming endeavor it can be to stay on top of those items that impact the curb appeal of your home. 

In our case, I'm not so concerned about what people driving or walking by our home think. Instead I'm more concerned with how the curb appeal makes me feel, or how it makes our visitors approaching the house feel. I want our home's exterior to set a tone of relaxation for all of our visitors, and it's hard to feel relaxed when you approach a yard of long unkempt grass, flower beds full of weeds, and significant sections of cracked or peeling paint on the house. After all, it's our goal to have more relaxing evenings like this.

This summer we've decided to approach the curb appeal and exterior maintenance of our home in three distinct phases.

1. Flower/planting bed beautification
2. Addressing exterior paint issues
3. Overall porch projects and paint

We're going to put off repairing/rebuilding/repainting our picket fence and some bigger yard projects until next summer, but this list of three items should keep us busy outside for most of the summer. So we kicked things off a few weeks ago with the garden beautification piece of our curb appeal project. 

You can see some of the paint/siding issues on the house in the photo above, but we were more focused on the flower beds. We planted a good number of ferns and other items last year, and they were doing well, but we had several bare spots we wanted to fill in. If you saw that we installed a drip irrigation system last year, you can also see it exposed in the photo. The black tubing has bothered me since we installed it, but we installed it all after mulching, so we never went ahead and buried it all last year. That's another item on our list that we'd like to take care of.

We have a few friends in Alexandria that have an absolutely lovely garden. After they visited us last year they told us we should stop by to split some of the plants they have when it came time to plant this season. So we took them up on the offer.

After a very nice tour of their gardens, we ended up walking way with several bags of plants destined for our garden. In total, we had ourselves a new rose bush, obedients, cone flowers, daisies, and sedum.

We took all of the plants to the house and placed them in the locations that would soon be their new homes. Throughout the garden we have about nine different areas where we can plant. I planned it all out based on likely cover, color and height of the plants, and where I felt our existing plantings were just a little thin.

That same weekend, my parents and brother had planned to visit. While I'm sure they wanted to relax a little, they also offered to help us get the garden in order for the season. I can't tell you how wonderfully welcome it is to have a helping hand when it comes to weeding, mulching, and general garden prep.

While my parents and I worked to rid our beds of as much dead, overgrown, and unwelcome inhabitants from our flower beds, my brother and Alex hit up Lowe's for all of the mulch and dirt we'd need.

Alex and my brother brought back 30 bags of mulch and three bags of dirt. It's amazing just how much mulch you need for this garden, which takes up a relatively small part of the yard.

We took a methodical approach to the whole project. First my parents trimmed or cut back the plants and boxwoods. Then my mom and I worked our way through the beds to remove weeds, and I worked with my dad to plant the new plants and flowers in theirs places around the garden. Alex then followed burying the drip irrigation line and running anything new to supply water to the new plants. Finally, my dad, mom, Alex, and I all worked around the whole yard spreading the bags of mulch. (My brother during this time was on the water side trimming our massive hedge.) The whole thing took two days, but when we were done we had the garden looking better than it's looked since we bought the house in 2014.

I varied the colors of plants from bed to bed to keep it interesting, and with the larger bushes now nicely trimmed back it gave some of the smaller plants a little more room. While the wood borders may not be perfect, they work well with the garden in its current state, and give us a well defined area in each section for plantings.

I'm very hopeful that the drip irrigation system will do wonders to keep everything well fed throughout the summer. And now that the line is fully buried, mid-day waterings won't end up supplying swelteringly hot water onto our plantings. 

One area that I'm particularly excited about is the front of the house. It's actually the "back" given the orientation of the front towards the water, but this is the view that visitors see when they pull up. The large white metal box houses the geothermal ground loop at the entrance to the house. We planted our new rose bush to the right of the box, and the rose bush from last year is on the left. It's my hope that these climbing rose bushes will flourish and eventually will camouflage this unsightly feature.

This section of the house is also where our drip irrigation system hose bib sits. It's in direct sun for the second half of the day and that abuses the hose timers. The first hose timer, which we installed last summer, was solar powered but the solar cell went bad after the first month, leaving our plants without water for a week (and they died). The second hose timer we installed had an LCD panel on it, which ended up going bad. We couldn't read what it said and we weren't able to change the program after that. So this summer Alex decided to go the wifi route. He picked up this Melnor Rain Cloud wifi enabled hose time. 

It has 4 outlet zones, was extremely easy to setup, has advanced scheduling options, and even has a component that allows the system to monitor soil dampness, only watering when the plants actually need water. Best of all (for Alex's peace of mind), he can check on the watering status from his phone. 

This is one of the parts of the house he wanted to be able to monitor remotely, and now he can.

Right now we're only using one outlet, so we will just cap off the other three. But we plan to expand this in the future if we ever plant a fruit, veggie, and flower garden in the front yard. Each zone has an independent schedule capability, which is great for something like a vegetable garden that has far different needs for water than a flower bed garden.

All told, we had a pretty solid weekend of work and effort to get this garden looking good. But when we were done we could really see that we made a ton of progress.

It's amazing how great a few dozen bags of mulch can make a garden look. We used the mulch with weed stop in it this year in the hopes that it might keep some of the weeds we normal get at bay. We'll see if it actually works, but I'd love to pull fewer weeds this year.

With the garden in shape our attention turned to the next more piece of our curb appeal efforts, taking care of the siding and paint issues that have plagued our house since day one. But that's another story for another blog post. I can tell you one thing for sure, when this is your scientific method for figuring out the right paint colors, you might be in for a bumpy ride.

Do you have any curb appeal dreams for your home this year? Is your garden the place you go to relax and enjoy, or is it a daunting part of your home that you dread the upkeep on each year? I have a love/tolerate relationship with my garden, and I welcome all advice on how to make it more of a love/enjoy relationship. 

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We've both known that a lot of these maintenance items have been put on the back burner, but I suppose we were living in pure blissful denial that we'd eventually need to deal with them...well until last week, anyway. While in the guest room applying makeup and drying my hair reality was unapologetically thrust into my mid-morning face. (Wait a second, why am I using the guest room to ready myself, you might wonder? For the last several years, the guest room dresser has served as my make shift vanity while our master bath has been in a state of flux. Okay, back to my story.) During this time of markup application I heard a repeated SCRAPE, SCRAPE, SCRAPE noise coming from our alley area. 

Wondering what it is I might see, I peered out the window of the guest room to discover that a neighbor's handyman/gardener was in the alley adjacent to our home and was raking up the ivy and tree debris along our house and patio wall. While part of me was mortified that it had become such an eyesore that a neighbor stepped in to tackle it, the other part of me was relieved knowing that it would be done. I hope this doesn't make me a bad person/neighbor. Apparently our blight was just too much for them, and for that, I'm very sorry.

I sheepishly slipped through the back gate, thanked the gentleman for his time and efforts, and thrust a stack of wrapped sugar cookies in his hands as a gesture of my now unending gratitude. I then called Alex to tell him what had transpired, share a few choice words, then let off a little steam about the fact that we were now "that house in the neighborhood!" 

As much as I prefer that the events hadn't transpired, this was the wake up call I needed. This was enough to kick my tail into gear and I knew I needed to pay special attention to our front "yard" before some family of raccoons decided they'd had enough with our filth.

I use the term "yard" loosely as our house sits directly on the sidewalk, but we do have two planted urns and a small patch of garden surrounding the city tree out front. The urn arrangements were looking sparse, and were in need of a little cleaning up.

The area surrounding the tree was also dead and lifeless, and trash littered the gutter of the street.

To make matters worse a careless parallel parker had run over the metal garden edge we had installed a few years back, leaving a mangled edge with mulch and dirt haphazardly spilling into the street. Needless to say, it wasn't a pretty sight.

After one trip, two garden stores, and several moments of indecisive gardening paralysis, I returned home with a trunk full of mulch, potting soil, and flowers, determined to whip (a small portion) of our home into Springtime shape.

I got to work, giving the topiaries a hair cut of sorts with a pair of scissors, following along the lines in order to give them a neat and tidy look. After ensuring an appropriate potted plant coif, I pulled out the old dirt and replaced it with a high quality potting soil intended for container gardening. I filled out the look by planting some new colorful flowers to add visual interest, in varieties that would both bloom as well as trail down the front of the pots.

Once Alex came home from work that night, he lent a hand to help break up old roots in the front garden in order to make room for the new plants while I finalized their layout. Now that the old tree has been gone for a few years the old roots are really breaking down.

We also worked together to straighten out the bent metal garden border, and hammered it back into the ground so it was once again secure enough to act as a retaining wall for the dirt and mulch. Please, rest of the world, stop running over our stuff. It's not very quick or easy to fix.

Finally I gave the whole area a thorough sweeping in order to make it look like people not only live in our home, but were not raised by wolves and actually give a hoot about its appearance.

My general feeling is that the plants around the tree are a little on the small side. My hope is that they'll continue to grow during the summer and will fill out the area a bit more. The cold hard truth is simple. Between the road dirt, doggie "irrigation" and stumbling pedestrians, these little plants have the odds stacked against them. At the very least, the area is clean, alive, colorful, and once again looks like we care about our home and neighborhood.

As it turns out, this was all done just in time. This past weekend Alex heard some commotion out front and peered out the window. Rather than a neighbor pitching in to help us get our acts together, he observed a couple posing on our front steps for what looked like professional engagement photos. 

I guess that's all the proof we need that we're no longer "that house" that points to a hot mess of home owners inside. Anyone out there looking for some lovely front steps to take some photos on, our house is almost up to snuff, at least after our next steps.

What are the next steps you might wonder? Paint, paint, and more paint. Cast iron steps, french doors, and the home's exterior...we're looking at you. Consider yourselves warned.

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We had lovingly cared for these plants, beginning our relationship with the utmost devotion, having planted them amid a torrential downpour.

We nurtured them through the long, hot summer months of 2012, ensuring their ideal level of hydration, and somehow managing to keep them safe from the harmful footfall of passing pedestrians and canine rain showers.

But by spring this year, as we alluded in an earlier post, things weren't looking too bright for our feathery friends. 

I attempted to trim them back in hopes they simply needed their dead ends to be pruned so they could flourish.

Now, with the passing of several months and the prime season for plants to make their post-winter debut, this is what we were left with. 

In other words, nada. As much as I didn't want to give up on them, I had no choice. With 20+ largely unknown guests coming to our home on Sunday for the big baby shower, I didn't want the first impression to be a lifeless, sparsely planted garden. 

In an effort to remedy the situation, I made a trip to our local Lowes to browse their garden selection. Admittedly plant care and gardening is well outside our wheelhouse, and it's almost as if Alex and I enter into a state of paralysis when entering a nursery. The choices seem overwhelming, our pulses quicken, and the shelves of flowers start to spin. How the heck, after all, are "Dumb and Dumber" going to make a successful selection? 

After way too much time, and hundreds of inspected plant tags later, I finally settled on three lavender plants as the replacements. 

I liked the silvery hue they would add to the space, and lavender is a personal favorite of Alex's. I may also have thrown away his clinging-to-life lavender plants from the back yard earlier this season, so it was only fair to bring this plant back in some way.

The project was relatively quick and easy. First, I brushed aside the mulch in order to dig up the old grass plants, being sure to dig a slightly larger hole than I needed. 

Then I sprinkled a bit of plant fertilizer in the hole, removed the new plants from their plastic tubs, and after loosening the roots, set them into their new locations.

After lightly tamping down the dirt, gently redistributing the mulch, and giving our new friends a nice healthy watering, we had a much more attractive and living addition to our front bed.

Though this isn't a project rivaling a kitchen or bathroom renovation, it's one of those little things that help to keep our house from looking like "that house" on the block. The jury's still out on how this front area of our home will ultimately transform, as Alex is still holding out hope he can find a reasonably priced fence that would look good for the surrounding area, but I'm quite happy with it and it's modest and open look. I'm very much looking forward to watching the lavender flourish over the summer. There's just something quite relaxing about a lush lavender bush.

Have you been working on any minor of major gardening projects lately? Since I've been up to my eyeballs with the shower planning and prep I was happy to get this little task checked off of my list. 

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After arriving home last week from an international business trip, I had the cruel realization that Alex and I had volunteered to throw the April neighborhood party. These "TGIF" parties are held by neighbors in and around our block every other month on a Friday. They're a great way to meet new neighbors, and of course we love them because we enjoy the glimpse inside other old homes in our area. Knowing we already have a commitment on the last Friday of April, a quick glance at the calendar indicated that we had less than ten days to create invitations, shop for party essentials, and get our house into shape. Yikes!

With Spring's late arrival, I want to play off the nice weather and host a "garden party," thus encouraging us to enjoy the onset of the warmer weather in the outdoor space (with Mother Nature's cooperation). The problem? Our back yard is a post-winter wasteland, complete with dead plants, shriveled flowers, rotten pumpkins, dog droppings, dry leaves, and various debris. The area doesn't exactly scream "welcome to our home." 

This weekend we got to work, and completed a marathon shopping trip on Saturday to pick up the supplies we needed. 

After three hours and three stops, we had a car full of loot and we were well on our way. It's shopping trips like these that make us really appreciate owning our SUV, especially after over a decade with a Mustang.

Armed with flowers, mulch, potting soil, a new welcome mat, and a few other odds and ends, we put together a game plan. Before Friday's event, we need to:

• Trim the topiaries and plant flowers in the front urns
• Plant flowers in the front bed, and mulch the area
• Clean the front steps and vestibule
• Rake up the sticks and debris along the side of the house
• Clean out the beds in the back yard
• Plants herbs
• Plant the vegetable garden
• Clean and oil the outdoor furniture
• Clean the house
• Oil the kitchen counters
• Replace the Christmas carol artwork in the sun porch with something less seasonal
• Purchase wine, cups, and other party items
• Set up an outdoor buffet for the party

Whew, what a list. Trying not to get too overwhelmed, I decided the first order of business would be to tackle the gardening out front. Luckily we had gotten a jumpstart on the front a few weeks back, when we cut back the grasses, and cleaned out the front beds.

Despite our previous cleanup efforts, what we were starting with looked pretty bleak.

Trying not to get discouraged, I determined this weekend's order of business would be to first focus on items one and two on our list: trim the topiaries and plant flowers in the front urns, as well as plant a few new perennials in the front bed and lay mulch the area.

Since planting our new trees in November, our cute spiral topiaries have been on the move, and had taken on a bit of an unkempt appearance.

I got to work with a sharp pair of scissors, and I was able to whip these guys into shape. I simply followed the spiral lines from bottom to top, snipping off the new growth, otherwise dubbed "crazy guys" in our household.

All it took was ten minutes to restore a crisp, neat appearance, which immediately helped the urns start looking a bit better.

Next up I determined the planting order for the urns' flowers. I arranged the sweet potato vines, purple aster, magenta brachyscome, and white gulliver bacopa, and once I realized I was happy with the order, I planted them in the urns.

To ensure proper coverage I also added in more soil, in this case Miracle Grow's moisture retention potting mix, which helps give the plants a bit of an edge during our long, hot DC summers. After a bit more finessing, I took a step back to admire. I was quite happy with the results.

After giving myself a second to smile at my newly planted urns, I turned my attention to the area around the tree. As I mentioned previously, we had done a bit of work to clean up the bed, so I could jump right in. After a bit of inspection, it appears that most of the plants are returning for another season. However, the jury is still out on the grass plants. I don't see any new growth, but I figured I'd keep them in the ground for a few more weeks just to be sure, and if they don't come back, we'll replant the area with something new. 

In order to give the existing plants a bit more time to grow, I played it safe at the store and purchased only three new additions for this area. I laid out the three plants, which I hope will lend a pop of color to the space. Once I was happy with the placement I got to work planting them.

To increase their odds of survival, I dug a larger hole than needed, and filled it in with a few scoops of the potting mix to improve the quality of the dirt.

Alex turned over much of the top layer of soil and removed any garbage or old mulch that had been left hanging around, leaving the front bed ready for the final step of its beautification, new mulch. It's amazing how much a new bag or two of mulch helps the flower bed look like it's ready for spring! 

We spread the mulch evenly over the whole bed, allowing our little flowers and new plantings to pop through. We also went ahead and covered the water meter cover, which had been so recklessly disturbed a few weeks back. Now that all of their reading is done wirelessly, this really shouldn't cause an issue, and it looks WAY better.

While we still kick around the idea of getting a black metal fence to surround the area, I've actually come to like it in its more simplistic setup. Granted, it will surely look better once these small plants start to actually grow and fill in, but I look at the current state of the bed and see all of its mid-summer potential.

Between the bed and our new plantings in the urns, the front of our home is once again becoming "respectable." In just a few weeks time the sweet potato vines should be gently cascading towards the ground, and the pops of color throughout the cast iron bases will hopefully be providing a dramatic base for the spirals.

While its full potential is still weeks away, the front of our home has what it takes to eventually become the quaint Old Town row house that we love. 

The front of our home is now welcoming enough to greet visitors as they arrive for our garden party. Though we still have a lot of work to do in the back yard, this is definitely a step in the right direction. 

Did you do any gardening this weekend? I know the weather has been hit or miss depending on the section of the globe you happen to occupy, but I can say for sure, I'm quite happy spring appears to have arrived in our neck of the woods.

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