Mini facelift

We love our house but when we moved in it was tied for the ugliest house on the street. Not much going on in the curb appeal department. Well no one wants that label so over the summer we did a few projects to spruce up the front of our house.

We had barren flower beds (the previous owners put down landscape fabric, covered it with mulch, and called it a day), random empty pots on the patio, and a less than fresh paint job that was peeling in parts.

Painting the exterior of the house was out of the question so we got to work on a few less pricey projects. As I've mentioned before I have zero gardening ability and that combined with brutal 100+ degree summer heat meant that we needed to select difficult-to-kill plants. I noticed a lot of geraniums around the neighborhood and they appeared to be doing well so we decided to go with a few of those. I also added in a few asparagus ferns for some variety and they are doing okay thanks to only getting morning sun and being shaded from the harsh afternoon rays by the patio overhang.

The project that made the biggest difference was painting the green front door and other trim. We picked a really dark blue with a hint of green but in reality the color dried much lighter. (Although it looks black in the photo below - weird.) Even though the color isn't exactly what we wanted, just the fact that its freshly painted and not faded and peeling makes a big difference!
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Here's Josh getting ready to paint the shutters - I'm glad he went up on the roof because I'm so clumsy there's a 80% chance I would have lost my balance and fallen off!

Finally we replaced the yellow brass front door hardware with satin nickel. I am still looking for a replacement doorbell so for now it will be a lovely reminder of the former yellow look we had going on.

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Anyway, enough of me blabbing on and on ... here's how it looks now:

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(I dont think the little changes are very noticeable in the picture but in person it looks SO much better!)

(Please excuse the brown patches of grass. I had the great idea to fertilize the front lawn but unfortunately I made the rookie mistake of overdoing it in a few patches so now we have some lovely dead areas of lawn - oops. As soon as it cools off a little we will be putting some grass seed down.)

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Now its moved up to being the second ugliest house on the street!! :-P