Front house remodel: Part 4

18 months old

I lied the last update. This will not be the last installment. We should have one more to show the final product (well and maybe a few more small updates throughout the summer…always a work in progress!). Let's get to it!

This is where we last left off.


My goals for this week were to get the front door painted, the house numbers up, the planter box made and painted, shutters up, and yard seeded. Spoiler alert…..we succeeded! Not a very excessive list so I sure would hope we could get it all done.

Starting off, I got to painting the front door. You should have already seen my inspiration picture and that we went with an apple green color. Joe also spray painted the knobs with some paint we already had from other projects. The brass was not doing it for me.


I was never not a fan of the original black but my main gripe was that when the door was shut, it still looked like it was open because of the storm door. We had numerous people tell us they thought out door was open when they pulled into our driveway and it was really shut. The black just blended to well.


It took 3 coats to cover the black.


Our house numbers have been up on the brick facade by the garage since we moved in. Here is one of my progress pictures from a few weeks ago and you can just make out the numbers under the light on the right side of the driveway (left side of this picture). They were hardly readable in this location so I knew I wanted to get nice big black ones to put by the door.


This is a before shot of the area I wanted them. I really dislike how uncentered the light is against the shutters so I was hoping by placing the numbers here they would even out the space. I picked these up at Menards on one of our trips. They were simple, black, large and cheap….Perfect!


And after..




Here is a before shot of the porch area. Do you see how you can hardly tell that the front door is shut?


No denying this door is shut.


We also changed out the white shutters for black.


The white were definitely dingy and we think the black will pop much better. (Not to mention, easier to keep from looking dirty).


This isn't the final shot of this area as we still have to paint the storm door. What color will we choose???


Joe knocked out a quick homemade planter box in the amount of time it took for me to run to the store to get paint. We had the extra lumber from the deck build so this was a mega easy project.


I went with green, at first. I thought it would be nice to have a pop of color beside the front door. As soon as I saw it up next to the brick, I knew we needed a change.


So black it went. The middle tree is cramping my style a bit now though so maybe we'll eventually move it to the other side of the garage when we edge that in. The box isn't as visible as I would have hoped.



Front elevation before:


Front elevation progress:


House before:


House progress:


Full house before:


Full house progress:


Completed list:
Remove dead plants….CHECK
Regrade slope of landscaping beds to drain correctly….CHECK
Add edging pavers on right landscaping bed….CHECK
Trim holly bush in right landscaping bed….CHECK
Transplant 2 bushes in back of left bed to the right bed…..CHECK
Lay plastic down in both beds…..CHECK
Cover with rock….CHECK
New black shutters…..CHECK
Paint front door window inset black….CHECK
Paint front door…..CHECK
New door numbers by front door….CHECK
Build planter box for flowers…..CHECK
Seed yard…..CHECK

Still To-do
Transplant tulips to planter box….half CHECK
Wrap garage door trim with aluminum (same as siding color)
Paint garage door black
Paint storm door