Curb appeal comes in many shapes and sizes.
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.
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.
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Continuing on our quest for curb appeal, we've tackled the next major step in our exterior project list at our "new" house, and I must say, I absolutely LOVE the results!
As we mentioned in our first post in this series when we talked about how we spruced up our flower beds , this summer we've also decided to approach improving the curb appeal and address some deferred maintenance items of our American Foursquare home in three distinct phases.
Yes, the exterior paint is the next major item on our list of projects, and boy is it needed. As you can see from the following photo, we have several examples where the paint on our siding had been compromised and was simply bubbling and peeling off.
This issue in the photo could been seen on all sides of the home's exterior. Alex even did a little bit of work last year to address some of the absolute worst sections on the front of the house.
Now, you know us as DIYers to the core, right? Well, we also like to fein that we're reasonable homeowners from time to time. When dealing with something that's a large scale project that requires many people to get it done in a timely manner, and would require a lot of work up high on ladders, my preference is to hire it out to the pros. As a result, when it came to painting our home (both now and when we last had our home painted in Alexandria), I look to a dependable painting crew.
But before the crew could get to painting, we had some color selections to make, as well as some prep work we wanted to tackle ourselves.
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Hope you all had a nice weekend. Today we're going to be trying something new on the blog.
Over the last several weeks I've been trying to knock out little projects here and there as time permits. These are small items I've been putting off for a while, things I can take care of in a relatively short amount of time, and things that are a little more routine. Rather than type up a giant blog post, I've started sharing some of these smaller projects on our Instagram Stories.
Since Instagram Stories fade away into oblivion after 24 hours, we figured we can share the video here as a quick blog post for anyone that didn't see it on Instagram. We're calling these #NiceLittleSaturday projects, since we should be able to knock most out in a day.
This first #NiceLittleSaturday project is a quick fix of a broken cabinet door that belongs to a good friend of ours. A dog she was watching got his collar stuck on the knob and broke the door right off. I figured it could be fixed really easily, and #NiceLittleSaturday was born.
VIDEO
And there you have it, that's our #NiceLittleSaturday post for this week. I'd say it was a success, and now our friend will once again have a working door on her cabinet.
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Though it's been a little quiet on the blog lately, we've been very hard at work on several ongoing house projects.
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.
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Our goal is simple. We have low voltage outdoor lighting and we want to be able to control it using Insteon home automation.
Ben when it came to outdoor low voltage lighting, we couldn't find one on the market that would work with home automation systems.
Back in February 2016 we shared the relatively inexpensive and very DIY friendly way you can add landscape lighting to your home. Though it looks great when it's on, the control of the lighting leaves something to be desired. There are several problems with how you can control the lights.
In the case of our unit, there's no good way to control it with a light switch. Each time you turn off the unit it resets, so turning it on only puts it in programming mode. Once it's set, when it's on it's on, even if you want it off, unless you actually press a button on the transformer. To turn it off we have to crawl behind the bushes and there's few people that want to crawl around in dark bushes at night.
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