What A Transformation!

When we bought the house back in October of 2000 it looked like this half hidden behind an overgrown yard and painted a dark brown color that literally made it fade into the background.





After some serious trimming of trees and clearing of overgrown shrubs (they were a fire hazard anyway),and a lot of hard work by me busting out that driveway over the summer, the house looked like this.this.

And now it looks like this.
There was only one thing missing and that came next.

The finishing touch was the picket fence. The process took about a month to complete and it was worth every penny.

Now I just have to work on the landscaping.

A Stairway To Heaven

This is my second attempt at steps and I think I did much better this time. I found these wonderful bricks at Home Depot. They can be used for small retaining walls and weigh about 5 lbs a piece. I like the way the seemlessly blend in with the soil, and they are really good at holding it back and staying in place.

It's Getting There...

We have almost finished at this point. The house, the shed and the carport were finished but we still needed more room to store our stuff; the lumber in the yard is from the original shed I wanted built. I wanted it built across the front of the yard thinking it might give us some privacy in the front of of the house The shed was going to be 10x20, but as they put the sides up I realized that it looked horrible so we had the brothers unassemble it and use the wood to build the two new sheds. They were the nicest peopl to work with and they were very professional with reasonable rates. They didn't even charge us to take the original shed down!

Now that the shed and the house are painted the same it's not looking so bad. We bought a patio set and you can barely see it in the side yard. We also added shutters to two of the windows and coordinating flower boxes to the shed.

It's all starting to come together...

You can see in the backyard that the other shed is now completed and painted to match the rest of the house. I removed all the iris’ from in front of the Adirondack chairs and planted some hedges behind them; they are still thriving. After all of the commotion during painting all my Johnny-Jump-Ups died and did not come back again. The Virginia creeper is growing back on the trellis although it had to be severely cut back so they could paint the house. It’s slowly beginning to recover. The vinca has almost completely covered the unsightly and useless propane tank. Another project on the horizon will be to move the hose bib to the side of the house, right now it’s behind the trellis and is a bear to get at.

My Green Thumb

As you can see spring is turning into summer and with the heat the plants go crazy, what was once a barren wasteland is now beginning to fill in with greenery. The large bush in the background is the black locust that I need to cut back every year. The shrub in front of that is the hydrangea which gets a lacy cream-colored flower on it all through summer, and as you can see the vinca that I planted is taking root. I planted some things on the other side of the stairs; some are holding on and others didn't make it so I have this hodgepodge of plants going on over there. I've got to make a decision on whether or not to pull them up and start over again or just leave them be and see what happens.

You're going to paint it what color?!?

Here you can see the shed trim getting a coat of primer. We really freaked some people on the street out because they thought that this was going to be the color of the house. I also planted a row of Hawthorne shrubs at the top of the street.

The Box in the Front Yard

At this point the shed looks like a hideous box in the front yard and I was beginning to have serious doubts about why I agreed to put it there in the first place. But it serves a purpose, you can see how the shed effectively hides the neighbors house, which now has a two story room addition off the back and is painted pumpkin yellow, which is a sight more uglier than my boxy shed. The previous owners sold the house to some people, who let’s say have unusual color tastes. I think they were trying to go for the color of pine wood and ended up looking like a yellow orange crayon instead.

Shades of Gray

This is what the house looked like after it was primed. Notice we took off the railing that went across the top window in the front of the house. We also removed all of the alpine-like shelves under the windowsills. They were rotting anyway and they didn’t fit with the new look I was going for.

Sanford and Son meets the Beverly Hillbilies

This is what was hidden behind that wooden section of fence you see from the front yard. I know it’s a mess. There’s the cheap tin shed, our gardening tools, the trash cans, branches from a tree we pruned ourselves, a piece of plywood we have nailed to the side of the house to cover up the previous owners doggie door, (if a dog can get out a raccoon can get in!), and last but not least the worst “no, no” of all… firewood stacked on the deck up against the house. All of this stuff has since been removed and it is now the site of a very nice dog run. The plywood has been removed from the side of the house and is now been properly mended and painted, and there's no more litter in the yard just two dog houses. By the way, the dark brown section of wood planking, in the upper right hand corner, is our neighbor’s idea of a good fence.

A $3000 Lesson

The guys who built the shed did such a good job we asked them to build us a carport as well. We were so excited to have something to keep the pinecones, sap and other debris from hitting our cars. We had it painted the same color as the house and shed so it matched and I put a beautiful green wreath on the front of it with some classy numbers. It really added to the property and it was functional. We had it for two years and when they resurfaced the street the county cited us for not having a permit and it being 3 ft on the easement, and they made us take it down. If it would have been even with the trunk of the pine tree they probably wouldn't have bothered us at all. It made us so mad! It’s not like we live in the city. We live in a very rural area in the middle of a national forest we will probably never have sidewalks. It was an expensive $3000 lesson.