Welcome Home Wednesday

Stephanie, over at Remembering Chaos, does a Welcome Home Wednesday post every week on her blog. She posts home updates from around her house and I just loved the idea of doing this. So I thought I'd join in the fun and post about a project we did this past weekend at our house. 

When we bought our house last September, the previous owners had recently painted the outside of the house a pale yellow to get it ready to sell. They must have gotten a great deal on the paint because not only did they paint the outside that color, but they painted the whole inside that color as well. (You can see what the house looked like when we bought it here.) I love a bright, fun yellow. In fact, I'm using yellow in our kitchen/dining/living room but this yellow was not a bright, fun yellow. Instead it was kind of a sad yellow and we couldn't wait to get rid of it on the inside and the outside.

Before we moved in, we painted the inside walls, but hadn't gotten a chance to do the outside. So this past weekend, we started on this very time-consuming, yet necessary project. I got the idea for a color here. They used Anonymous by Sherwin Williams and used their Duration outdoor paint. I love the way it looked with their brick house so I thought it would look great on our house too. So we went for it and got started Saturday morning. By the end of Saturday we had pretty much finished painting the front of the house.We had originally planned on just painting the iron beams to match, but later decided to just go for it and replace them with white square beams instead. This was always what we wanted to do, but thought we'd just paint them for the time being. After we realized painting them was just too hard, we decided to have my dad replace them and I'm so glad we did. The house looks 100% better now!

Sunday after church, my dad started on the beams and Jake and I got started on painting the back of the house. We got nearly half-way done painting the back and my dad got 2 posts in by Sunday evening. Monday morning, my dad finished the posts and that's where we are at this point. We still need to touch up a few spots on the front, finish the back and also paint the sides. Thankfully, the sides are mostly brick, just a little bit of siding up top. Here's what the back and sides of the house look like, so you can see what we have to paint.

There are several other outdoor projects we want to do which include replacing the front doors with something like these and removing the screen doors, adding some furniture to the front porch, adding railing to the front porch in between the beams like this, adding a new mailbox and sprucing up the landscaping all around. We also want to replace the old garage door with one like this, replace the upper deck and replace the fence with a white, 6 foot vinyl fence. Of course, these will happen over time, but we're excited to have gotten started on making the outside of our house look so much better and we can't wait until it's all finished. I'll keep you all posted on our updates as we have several in the works inside and out. It's a huge work in progress and we're really trying to enjoy every minute of turning this house into the home we want it to be.