Painted House

Last summer we spent two months giving the exterior of our home a makeover.  

We replaced the front door with more of a craftman style door, got rid of the window to the right of the door, and added some chunky white trim for added charm.  I couldn't believe what a huge transformation it was, just replacing the door!

The next thing we did was tear out all of the existing molding around the exterior.  It all looked very "70's" style and half of it was so old it was rotting away.

My husband installed all new molding around the windows and edges and corners of the house.  It's kind of hard to tell in this picture what is new, since you can still see those vertical lines where the old molding around the windows used to be.

The next thing we did was seal and patch every. single. seam and nail hole around the ENTIRE house.  This took us FOREVER.  But it's all that detail work that made the biggest difference in the end.  After the paint went on, our 70's looking siding, looked brand new!  It was seriously worth all of the tedious work and long hot days.

With my husband's paint sprayer and a scissor lift the bishop from our church lent us, my husband was able to paint two coats around our entire house in just five hours.

The molding around our garage doors, and windows and such was painted white.  We also added new matching light fixtures around our garage doors and by our front door.  The light fixtures were purchased at Lowes and then we spray painted them a flat black.  

Without showing you the entire exterior, for privacy reasons of course, here is a before and after.  The top picture shows what our home looked like when we bought it, and the bottom picture is what it looks like now.

It was a lot of work doing all of the prep and painting by ourselves.  Hiring it out would have been nice.  But we knew we were perfectly capable of doing all the work ourselves and doing it this way saved us a lot of money.  The reward of what it looks like now was totally worth all that hot sweaty summer time and effort.