From Boring to Beautiful: The Curb Appeal Challenge for Fixer #2

We bought this house in the Fall of 2015, when our first born was only 4 months old. We knew it was going to be a challenge working on the curb appeal of this house.

First impressions of this house:

Dated.
Boring.
Yellow. (Yuck.)
The landing SUCKS. Literally, it is stupid hard to get into this house, almost impossible when carrying groceries or small children.
They obviously replaced the front, downstairs windows with windows that didn’t fit.
A positive – the roof was solid.

This is the back patio area, note the large ugly window. That becomes a patio door. (You can see it in the Living Room update post.) The door goes away, the window in the middle is replaced.

Back of the house which is the ‘enclosed porch’ that we turned into Bedroom #2. All windows seen get replaced and the ones in the jut out are replaced and moved up.

The Curb Appeal Challenge for Fixer #2

Curb appeal can be hard work.

We originally wanted a go with a darker blue color, however the immediate next door neighbor is a medium blue (as you can see) and the neighbor across the street is a light blue, so we stayed away from THAT design mistake.

This is the new kitchen window we talked about in the Kitchen remodel.

Adding a much larger window evened out this space and made it eye-catching rather than the eyesore that it was. Hubby and his dad and a friend from church took down and resided most of the house, but especially this wall and the back porch/Bedroom #2 wall.

Replacing the ugly yellow skirting around this porch was one of the best things we did for the exterior.

We bought inexpensive pine shingles and stained and poly’d them, then hubby installed them in an afternoon. The brilliance of the wood made the whole house pop.

Did you ever realize what a huge thing it is to be able to stand level with a door and open it without squeezing out of the way or knocking yourself (or a small child or your husband) back down the stairs? It’s pretty huge.

This is after siding paint, before porch window paint, window boxes and upper trim.

The Curb Appeal Challenge Complete

Finally the outside was done!

Some might wonder why we didn’t do any landscaping.

We actually DID landscape – however everything died.

You could say we had a hard winter the previous year, or you could assume the soil wasn’t fit for growing living things.

It was the latter.

We lived in a Superfund area, and our house was on the docket for remediation the spring after we sold it. There was no use trying to save landscaping or repair sidewalks and the driveway when in 3 months the DEC was going to rip it all out and replace it anyway.