A Transformation

As long-time readers probably remember, we bought our first home in March of 2009. It needed a LOT of work. We have been getting things done, slowly but surely.

One big thing that stood out as horrendous when you looked at the front of the house was the porch. It was bumpy and splotchy and multicolored from being older (our house was built in 1976) and also having porch carpeting there for a long time. (EWW!) A neighbor told us that the previous owners had a handicap ramp there for their child for a long time, so they didn’t care to fix it up.

We spent the entire last year going back and forth on what to do. Should we spend tons of money replacing it? Should we paint it? Should we build a brick porch? Should we put stone down on the top?

Cheap won. We decided to paint it. Definitely not the prettiest option, but it will do for now.

As you can see in the before picture, the nice concrete coating on the bottom part of the house is gone. It cracked and fell off in the last few weeks. Nothing about this house surprises me anymore.

The bottom of the porch is all cracked off as well, but the main foundation is in good shape, so we decided we will just hide that with mulch and landscaping, which we will be working on more this weekend!

We decided to go ahead and paint the bottom of the house, too. It really needs to be re-concreted (if that is a word), but the paint definitely looks better in the meantime.

Joe painted the trim on the porch and I rolled the rest of the paint on. We had it done in no time.

I was hoping it would dry a bit darker. We may keep it as-is, or we may do another coat with a darker gray. What do you think?While the porch looks much better, the green trim does not. We didn’t do the whole house in it yet since we’re replacing a lot of the boards and the gutters, so we think we’re going to do white trim instead.