Curb appeal: Adding board and batten cottage-style shutters

After a bunch of curb appeal improvements we did in 2011, I was thinking the house was looking pretty good. But after we removed those giant Rose of Sharon bushes last year, it was glaringly obvious there was something missing.

Once upon a time our house had shutters. You could see sloppy paint outlines on the brick from where they had been, but they were gone long before we bought the house. Their absence didn't used to bother me, but once I really took notice, I couldn't un-notice the outlined nothings on the sides of the windows. I needed shutters and pronto!

The ones available for sale are not cheap (the size I needed run $86/pair at Home Depot) and I needed four (just for the front windows). Much more economical to DIY them. So I asked my dad if he would make me some board and batten cottage-style shutters as a Christmas gift.

He made them from some old barn wood he cleaned up and planed smooth. He even painted them for me in the color I chose, Valspar's Homestead Resort Olive. Our brick is mostly red, but has some odd yellow and green bricks thrown in, so I coordinated the green with those tones.

After the never-ending winter, he finally hung them up a couple of weekends ago. They really brighten the face of the house and add another layer of architectural interest. And the cottagey cuteness factor is turned way way up.

Just for kicks, here's how far we've come since we moved in five years ago. Feels totally different! I think the brick and the windows are the only things I haven't touched. (Excuse the junky photo below; it's from the real estate listing when we bought the house.)

I want to paint the stairs the same color as the porch this summer. And replacing the broken walkways is still on the to-do list. One day that will get done.

See more curb appeal improvement posts >>

Landscaping intervention, Part 2: Let's rock!

Onto part two of my landscaping intervention!

Um... you can see why it needed an intervention. My hostas are doing awesome, actually, but you would never notice because the weeds were stealing all the focus.

This is an area I don't see everyday, or even every week. I have to make a special effort to go see it. It's out of sight/out of mind and tends to become overgrown with weeds. Like, this overgrown or worse. (Take my word for it. Much worse.)

Mulch would help, certainly, but as I noted before, this area is large (4 x 36 feet) and would probably require something like 12 or 15 bags of mulch. For just this area. To me, that's a lot of wasted money, effort and time every year, especially for a space that we don't really get to enjoy. 

My overall landscaping goal is to make everything as low maintenance as possible and it doesn't get any more low maintenance than rock. Well, concrete, I guess, but who wants more concrete in their life? Rock it is.

First, I needed to clean things up. A couple of hours pulling weeds and it was looking better already.

I went with bagged rock from Lowe's. I'm not sure if this was the cheapest way to go; I didn't look into alternatives like a load of rock from a landscaping materials place. We don't have a place to dump a load of rock that wouldn't require hauling it around the entire house. It just didn't make sense in this situation. We ended up with 35 bags of rock at $3.58 each, so with tax, just around $125 total.

I added the curve of flagstones for some added visual interest, and to remedy one area where water spills over from the gutters during heavy downpours and erodes the soil. You can see how the dirt has splashed up onto the house in that area. (The gutters are clean and we have screens to keep out gutter clogging junk. It's just weird roof design and I'm not sure there's much we could do about it.)

So with a couple of stones placed just so, I worked them into a larger curving design so they wouldn't look like islands floating in a sea of gravel.

But I'll let you in on a little secret. The real reasons I used the flagstones at all were because a) we already owned them. They were all salvaged from underneath the broken concrete in our backyard.  I am all about using what you already have. And b) working them into the landscape cut down on the amount of rocks we had to buy. I can't begin to guess by how much, but certainly a significant percentage.

Dan and I started spreading the rock, but soon realized we needed some type of edging to keep the rocks from spilling into our neighbor's driveway. The project grows!

Plastic edging was about 75 percent of the price of concrete edging pavers. This area has a high probability of getting stepped on and given that it's so close to the neighbor's driveway, it even has the possibility of being driven on (accidentally, of course). I went with the long-term solution: concrete pavers.

These are not actually "edging" pavers. They are 6x9 inch stones meant to lay flat, but they were the right color and the right price and real edging pavers are similarly 5-6 inches in height. They were also from Lowe's for 81 cents each (just over a dollar per linear foot). I bought 48, so $42.55 with tax for all.

I dug a narrow trench with a flat shovel and laid the stones lengthwise. It probably took 2-3 hours to do the whole line of them (completed in multiple sessions). After all the edging was in, I spread the rest of the rock in a thick layer (probably 2-3 inches). And done (finally)!

It looks a thousand times better, and I no longer feel like a bad neighbor! It's not perfect or professional-looking, but at least it looks like I'm trying. Considering that this area was bare dirt when we moved in four years ago, we can call it progress.

I am already discovering this is not a fool-proof way to keep out weeds. They just keep coming no matter what you do! But now maybe a five-minute weed-pulling session every week will be sufficient.

Landscaping intervention, Part 1: Painted drain pipe

About a month ago, I mentioned that tackling the neglected area on the side of our house was on my short list. It's a long, narrow strip of dirt (about 4 x 36 feet!) right next to our neighbor's driveway. 

And it's kind of weird because that line along the concrete is the property line. Where I come from, property lines are vague distinctions far off in the grass, not five feet from the side of the house. But it is what it is. Luckily, they are nice neighbors.

My dad kicked off improving the space by burying a drainage pipe last month, and I'm using that as a spring board to motivate myself to finish off the space.

First things first (well, easy things first): painting the short length of PVC drain pipe sticking up above ground. The pipe is great and doing its job, but the obvious white PVC-ness of it all was looking cheap. And that printed label on the pipe wasn't super attractive.

After wiping the pipe clean, I masked off the area with a couple pieces of cardboard. I wrapped a newspaper around the aluminum downspout and kind of shoved it inside the PVC, but I didn't use tape anywhere!

Then I used everyone's favorite spray paint, Rust-oleum's oil rubbed bronze. It's a paint and primer in one and it adheres to plastic (important!). It's not exactly a match to the brown downspout, but I'm OK with that. I just wanted the PVC to look like metal or clay or something other than white plastic, and the oil rubbed bronze color blends nicely.

See what I mean? Much better! This is one of those details that takes five minutes, and that no one but me is ever going to notice on its own, but it affects the way the area looks as a whole.

Disregard all of those weeds and the spray paint on the dirt. We'll save those for next time.

Some light weekend trench digging: Re-routed drainage pipe

It's a post about dirty dirt! Sorry. But this sort of work lays the foundation for prettier projects, so it has to be done.

Last weekend my dad created a new drainage system from this downspout on the side of our house to direct the water away from the foundation and toward the back yard. We had a little bit of seepage into the basement in this general location and on the outside the ground had eroded away.

The former drainage system (if you could call it that) was here when we bought the house: a big piece of black corrugated pipe. With holes in it. So the water would flow out of the downspout, into the pipe and then flow out the holes and into the ground next to the foundation. Stupid.

I don't have a good before photo or lot of progress photos. I don't think my dad likes me taking photos of him while he's working. And I'm pretty sure he thinks I'm nuts for taking photos of holes in the ground or such things.

And I don't have a lot of details, but he dug a trench in the shape of a J and buried a similarly shaped PVC pipe maybe a foot below the surface.

The water now empties into an area I call the mud pit. Or the ugly corner. Or just the back corner. It goes by many not-nice names.

Now that the drainage pipe has gone underground and the surface has been re-leveled, it's looking much more put together. That black corrugated plastic pipe was ruining everything! Good riddance. This gives me some incentive to continue improving this area.

The hostas are just starting to come up here, and I have a plan to divide the larger ones and send them down the line to the blank spots toward the back. (I've been doing this for a couple of years now to generate enough plants to fill the space, and this might be the last time I have to do that.)

This area is on the side of the house that I don't see everyday. It's kind of out-of-sight/out-of-mind and gets horribly weedy. The loose plan is to lay down some landscaping fabric to stop the weeds and then add some rock to finish things off.

And then there's my mud pit where the water is going to drain now. It's pretty much wasted space. Nothing grows here, so my plan is to lay some rock and brick I've salvaged from around our property to hold the soil and make the area walkable in the muddy seasons.

p.s. No digging activity at our house would be complete without uncovering buried treasure. Check back tomorrow to see what we found!

Exterior updates complete: Roof, siding and soffiting

Guess what I got for Christmas! Just a new roof. And siding. And soffiting. And fascia. And gutters. And gutter screens! The roofing company we hired finished up all the work a couple of days before Christmas and now our house is looking mighty fresh.

And strangely quiet now that all the birds and other wildlife can't get into the soffiting. I'll spare you all the disgusting details, but the workers found old bird nests around nearly the entire perimeter of the house. Many of the trim boards were rotted out and had holes for birds and squirrels to come and go (and stay). Our wild animal hotel is now closed for business.

And the sea of brown is no more! Now our house has some actual definition between the brick and the roof and the second story. It's all grown up!

The shingle color is Oxford Grey, which has a greenish tint to it. In the sunlight it looks... well, gray, but on cloudy days it takes on a mossy green hue that I love.

And you'd never know that weird boarded-up window was ever there. Everything looks so neat and tidy.

Yeah, this is still the ugly side of the house with all the utilities, satellite dish, a/c unit and trash cans. But now the siding on the dormers matches the siding on the back side of the house, making everything look a bit more cohesive.

I also had them put brown downspouts where they fell on the brick so they would blend in better. (The gutters and downspouts on the sided parts of the house are white.)

It's fun to see how our house has changed since we bought it in 2008. I didn't realize how shabby the outside really was until we polished it up this year. (Excuse the poor image quality above. That's actually from the real estate listing when we bought the house.)

We've got things left to tackle: the walkways, the landscaping, but we are so far beyond what what we purchased 3.5 years ago.

See more of this year's curb appeal improvements >>

New roof: A few photos

Our new roof is done, and, I have to say, it's kind of awesome. Is it weird that I'm so excited about this? I really love the color (good because we'll be stuck with it for 20+ years!), and it will only look better once the new white fascia and gutters go up.

The brown shingles still on the dormers stick out quite a bit (especially from farther away than the perspective of this photo), but the new siding should be here in a couple of weeks.

Mini roof update

The work on our roof has started! And when I say "work," I mean complete and total replacement.

This is what it looked like about midday yesterday, and the roofing crew should be finishing up sometime this morning. Already, I'm loving the way the green/gray of the roof is playing off the red brick. (I'm also loving how they are protecting my junky landscaping with that blue tarp.)

The rest of the work (siding, soffiting, etc.) is still a couple of weeks out. Hopefully they'll be able to squeak it in before the end of the year!

A whole new look: Exterior color choices

Although the decision to replace our roof, soffiting, and gutters sort of snuck up on us, I have to confess I've been thinking about exterior colors for months. In fact, I had everything so planned out in my head, it took me all of two minutes to pick our new shingle, siding and soffiting colors.

Right now, the brick, the trim and the roof all kind of just melt into one another into a big blob of brown. Bleh. I knew that I didn't want it to stay this way forever. So months ago, I came up with a loose long-term color plan to follow.

Knowing what colors I wanted the roof and trim to be someday helped me choose colors when I was painting the porch, refinishing the front door, painting the railing...

Of course, I didn't realize the opportunity replace everything else and execute the full plan would come quite so soon.

The biggest change will be the color of the roof. It might seem like we're jumping the gun a bit on replacing it, maybe because I've never talked about it here. And actually, between Dan and I, we've only briefly mentioned replacing the roof a few times in the past three years.

But when we bought the house, the inspector estimated the roof to be about 15 years old -- and that was three years ago. It's at the end of its life and the roofing company we chose rated it a 4 on a scale from 0 to 20. That less-than-stellar rating combined with the small leak in the living room means there really was no arm twisting involved in the decision.

Anyway, I chose these architectural shingles in a greenish gray. They will contrast with the red brick so much better than the current sandy brown shingles. I've seen a few houses in person with this combo and it will look great with the style of our house.

And then there's the second story dormers, which are currently faced in roofing shingles. They are starting to flake off and really, shingles aren't the best material for vertical surfaces. We're getting the dormers re-surfaced in vinyl siding, and I settled on this beige tone called "Pebble Clay." Honestly, there aren't that many colors of vinyl siding available, so really my choice came down to a few shades of brown, beige and white.

White would make the dormers super noticeable, and since they are an addition to the original house, I thought it best to downplay them. This beige shouldn't draw attention to itself. Plus it happens to be the exact same color of the siding on the back of the house, so it made sense to match that.

The new soffiting, facsia and gutters will all go white, providing better definition for the lines of the roof. The white will also tie in the white windows and balance the light gray stonework of the foundation.

Here's my quick photoshop rendering of what the house will look like once all this work is done. Excuse the lack of texture; I didn't want to pour hours into this.

Yes, it's a very traditional color combo, and maybe even expected, but this is a very traditional-style house. If I fight that with some crazy colors, it's just going to look stupid. This is going to turn the cottagey cuteness factor way up.

I'll save you from having to scroll back up to compare. Here's the current/before work photo.

Can't wait to get rid of that brown roof. Seriously, why did someone think that was a good combination with the red brick? There are multiple better choices commonly available (black, gray, green, etc.). Ah, well. Hold on little house, makeover help is on the way! Cross your fingers for a warm winter.