New House Before + After: The Evolution of Our Home's Facade

It's been 11 months since we first bought our "new" house. It's pretty hard to believe when I just think about it, but when I look back through pictures of the facade--which I've now captured in every season--I realize that yes, it has in fact been quite a while since we moved in and starting working on this place. 

Because I love Before + Afters (I think you know this by now), I thought you might enjoy seeing the evolution of the front of our house. I think that those of you who own homes will know that although the evolution is slow and we're still not where we want to be, each of these changes that we've made have taken lots of time, money, and effort on our part. 

Anyways, here's what we've done over the past 11 months...

{Oh, and a quick note before you look: please ignore our landscaping (or lack thereof). Despite working in our yard quite a bit over the past almost-year, we were really just maintaining. We decided that we would worry about our grass and flowers/major landscaping overhauls next year. You can only focus on so much at a time!}

Above: This is how our house looked when we first purchased it. Because it was the middle of the winter, we knew we wouldn't be working on the yard or outside anytime soon, so things stayed pretty status quo until spring...

Above: As soon as spring moved in, our first order of business was to paint over the outdated maroon siding around our entryway. Although we had planned for the color to be slightly more grey than it turned out, we were still happy with it. {Here's the official entryway Before + After post.}

Above: After painting the entryway, we moved on to our front door. Although we really don't like the oval stained glass door, the previous owner put it in RIGHT before selling the house and the door is really nice, so we decided to just paint it and live with it for a while; we'll change it someday down the road. Once we painted it a bright, fun red, I was much happier with it. {Here's the "How-to"/Before + After post for the door.}

Above: In July, we had the horrible Christmas Tree shrubs along the front of our house removed! We were so happy--they were pretty ugly and out of control. In this picture we haven't yet planted new shrubs, so the front of the house is a bit barren. As you can see, we also added an American Flag (Ben's touch--it was very important to him). 

Above: We planted new shrubs in the front and flowers were blooming! Also this was the greenest that our grass/weed yard looked all summer ;) 

Above: Just last weekend, we had all of our outside light fixtures replaced (Before + Afters below). Previously, they were all un-matching, cheap, and rusted or out-of-date. Yuck. We love our new fixtures and love how light our house looks when we have them all turned on at night! One more project you'll see in this pic: we painted our front stoop. Next up, we need to paint the entryway stoop the same color.

Welp, that pretty much sums it up! Here's what we still have on our "facade" list, all of which will have to wait until Spring 2016: 

• Repaint lightpost (it needs it!)
• Entryway: replace door in entryway, paint stoop, re-do stairs
• New front walkway
• Add "accent" white fence along front walkway (sounds lame but I promise it will look great! We have a neighbor who did this and we love how it looks)
• Landscaping, new grass, etc. 

It's never-ending but it sure is gratifying! Thanks for being a part of our first almost-year in our new home ;) 

You can view more of our home Before + Afters here.