No More Pink House!

Long story semi-short:

We bought a 15-year old pink house.  It was vacant for 12+ months and had been egged by teenage hooligans.  The garage door was super nasty and had stripping paint along the base where water had collected.  We've wanted to paint it since moving in.  After 2 days of hard work (by VivaxPro Painting... there is no way we were going to tackle this mess ourselves) and some $$ we now have a beautiful dark gray house that looks super sharp and brand new!  People we've never met have already come by to tell us how nice it looks.  The neighbors are probably as excited as we are.  :)

The outside of the house was not something I regularly photographed, so here are as many 'before' pictures as I could find.

Yard and back of house the day we saw it with our realtor (Feb 2011)

Here you can see the egg splatter on the garage door and the chipping paint at the bottom.

This past winter...

 The house does not look as pink in pictures as it did in person - but trust me, it was pretty pink.

 

The trim on the back of the house is the same color as the body...

Not any more!

 I love how much bigger the windows look now that they are accented against the house.

  We have new light fixtures we still need to put up... get rid of the broken gold ones.

 Our freshly stained deck (yes, the 2nd coat is finally done) looks even nicer up against the new paint!

 

Red door. :)

 It took Austin a couple days to discover this. 

"Mommy, our door isn't blue anymore. It's RED! Let's go touch it." 

He'll stop what he's doing just to go touch the red door.  Funny kid.

 We had them extend the trim color to the soffits (underside of the trim connecting to house).  It gives a much brighter, and bolder look.  No one in our neighborhood has this done so I love that it makes our house a little extra unique!  ;)

We chose a dark charcoal gray, almost black, for the small facia trim and diamonds.  So sharp!

And last, but not least... no more nasty garage door!  Hooray!

Projects Part 1

One thing I've really enjoyed about owning a house is having projects.  Is that weird?  I like being able to do various things, whether they are simple decorations, or big maintenance projects that help beautify and improve our home.  We did LOTS of projects/work on the house before we moved in, but we have been continuing in a less extreme manner.

From about October-December I worked on the master bath.  It needed a patch job on the wall behind the toilet which meant that the toilet needed to be put back together, the walls needed to be painted, etc.  It shouldn't have taken me 3 months to finish, but I just worked on it when I felt like it (which wasn't that often - I was a little painted out at this point)

 About four inches behind this wall was a broken pipe that was one of the very first projects we had the plumber work on.  I screwed the piece of drywall back into the stud and patched it up, just like my mother taught me...

 Good as new!

I painted the ceiling and baseboards white with the walls the same color as our bedroom.

Finished product. (I'm discovering what a great product spray paint is.  I wanted Command hooks for the walls and behind the bathroom doors but didn't want to spend $7 for the nice metal ones.  I bought the cheap white multi-packs and used some extra spray paint I had)

Throughout the winter I did mostly indoor decorating projects.

I found these drapes at Bed Bath and Beyond and liked them so much I bought a second set in a different color for the family room.  I made the wall art using an idea from Pinterest. (This website couldn't have become popular at a better time.  I've had so much fun getting ideas for all kinds of things off of Pinterest)

This is another Pinterest craft - I wrapped rubberbands around some vases from our wedding and spraypainted them black.  They fit in with the other decor in our room and bathroom and now we have cool q-tip and toothbrush holders.

Yet again, Pinterest find.  (Jeff makes fun of all my Pinterest activities, but he never complains about the final product.)  Austin's room needed a little something on the walls so I wrapped scrapbook paper around some foam board I had laying around. :)

Once spring hit, Jeff and I decided to restain our deck.  My mom brought up their power washer and we sprayed all the nastiness off of both the deck and the swingset.  Jeff sanded the deck all day - what a way to spend your first Saturday off of work in several months - he was a trooper!  We thought we'd be able to stain the entire thing (2 coats) the following day.  HA!  Projects never go as planned, right?  After a couple hiccups completed the first coat... about 3 weeks after we started.

 Mom really is the queen of projects.  Whenever she comes over she's always ready to get something done.  Thanks Mom!

 Amazing what a good blast of water can do.

Freshly sanded and new color!

First coat complete! 

(We just finished the second coat a few days ago - it only took 3 months - but I still need to take a picture)

It repells water like it should but attracts a lot of bird poop, go figure!