The Adored Abode

When we moved into our home a little over 4 years ago the front landscaping was very overgrown. Over the years we slowly replaced all of the landscaping and removed a few trees that were too close to the house or rotting from ant damage. We also had the exterior painted and had a new stamped concrete patio installed – it has made a world of a difference! This has all been over the course of 4 years. Unless you hire it all out right away, exterior work, just like interior work, takes time. Creating a home you love takes time. A lot of time (and money if you are doing major renovations).

I thought it’d be fun to recap of where we started and where we are now with the exterior! There are still a few things we need to do, hello new roof, and some additional landscaping in the back among other things, but we’re really happy with where things are now!

Updating the Landscaping

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Over the past few years we have updated a lot of the landscaping around our home. We started with very overgrown, woody shrubs and so many trees! We love lots of trees, but unfortunately a number of trees were too close to our foundation and some were rotten from ant damage. We slowly removed a number of trees (we hire this out) and also ripped out the overgrown bushes in our front yard.

It’s hard to tell in pictures, but the bushes on the far right side of our house were nearly as tall as me! We felt our overgrown landscape really hid the front of our house and also made it very dark inside.

After removing the bushes it felt like the front of our house could breath again! You could see the fireplace better – which is one of my favorite features of our home. Having fireplace on the front of your home is unique in our area and I wanted to highlight it, not hide it!

We would love to add a few more plants to the front, but for now we are waiting until things fill in a bit more.

We also had an entire bed of ivy ground cover taking up almost a third of our back yard. We really wanted more grass and to create a cleaner look in the back yard so we decided to remove the bed of ivy and replace it with grass. This was quite the arduous process.

It took a lot of patience to remove the ivy, level the ground, and seed grass. It was all worth it though!

We are so happy having more grass instead of a bed of ivy that really just looked like weeds most of the time. The grass is a little brown right now (hello summer), but that’s alright.

Painting the Exterior

I have a whole post about painting the exterior of our home, but it made such a difference in how our home feels that I had to mention it here too! We went with a non-stark white for the base color and a warm gray for the trim detail. We also removed the gingerbread trim detail underneath the windows and it made such a huge difference on modernizing the style of the exterior, while keeping true to the class Tudor look.

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This really shows you how much the large bushes were hiding the front of the house! We love the exterior of our home now.

Installing a new Stamped Concrete Patio

This is another item that has its own post. It made such a crazy, good difference difference in our backyard and how we use the space!

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We added about 4 feet to the depth of the patio and 8 feet to the width. In hindsight we could have made it even bigger, but it gives us so much more space as is!

We used to have a major mud/flooding problem on the patio anytime it rained because the patio was so sunken, but now that the new patio is raised above ground level as it should be our patio stays clear of mud. This makes muddy footprints tracked into the house a much less common occurrence. We would love to add an herb garden, a bigger table with more seating and more landscaping to this area, but that is a project for another day (or year).

What’s Next for the Exterior?

So much progress has been made on the exterior of our home and we are really happy with where it is now, but there are a few things we would like to do still. Likely over the next few years.

In the front:

• Get a new front door installed – our current door isn’t really our style as we prefer something with more modern, clean lines.
• Add more landscaping in the front – the front landscaping has come a long way, but we’d like to fill it in with a few more plants and shrubs.
• A new roof – eventually we will need to replace our entire roof since we believe it is from 1995, but we are hoping to get a few more years out of our current one.

In the Back:

• Spruce up the patio furniture – the current table we have has seen better days and we would like something bigger for when we have family and friends over, more seating in general would be ideal!
• Add evergreens along the back fence – we don’t love the color of our neighbors fence behind us, we would love to add a row of taller evergreen shrubs along the fence line to distract from the orange-red stain.
• Build an herb garden for the patio – we would love to create a small herb garden on our patio, maybe with a few veggies!
• Trellis/more plants around the patio – in the future we would like to add a planter box with a trellis to the side of the patio to give us a bit more privacy, and just add more landscaping in general around the patio!

Even though there’s more we want to do to the exterior, it’s not going to stop us from enjoying it now. Don’t wait until your home is “perfect” to enjoy it or have people over.