A much needed facelift!

For two years now, Patrick has been ready to move our projects outside the house. We wanted to be able to drive up to our house and be proud of it, as opposed to stealthily sneaking in the front door every evening when we get home, not doing Christmas lights or putting out pumpkins at Halloween. The idea was to not draw attention to this derelict-looking house. We knew that the inside was getting more awesome by the day, but to everyone else, they just saw an old ranch style home with mold making its home on our concrete block siding and overgrown bushes. 

Remember what it looked like when we moved in?

And the thing is, we live right across from a public boat ramp and park, so as people are putting their boats in the water or playing with their kids, they're staring our derelict in the face. Or maybe they don't notice our house at all because the poor thing is so ugly. The first thing my sister-in-law (also my realtor) said when we pulled up to the house is, "we probably passed this one up online because of the seahorses and it's ugly." (Which, by the way, the seahorses on the house were part of the inspiration for the blog name, ugly and all!) 

To avoid that situation when we go to sell our house, and to have at least a month of pulling up to the house and smiling, or at least not wincing, we've hired (who else?) my contractor brother to finally do the dirty deed and paint this thing! Since we're in more of an exit strategy plan with the house since we're moving, we didn't want to spend the extra money to stucco the house. Sad day, I know, but worth saving the cash for finishing the unfinished on the inside. Also since we're on such a tight timeline now, and Patrick has been back and forth to Mobile for work, and instead of attempting at least a partial DIY as usual, we figured  we'd call in the cavalry on this project. And it was worth it. Also we knew that even though we're painting the house, it's still just going to be painted concrete block, but at least it will be clean painted concrete block, and by the time we got home from work on the third day, it'd be D-O-N-E. 

Without further ado, I'll share some inspiration pictures. Based on my bro's professional painter's opinion, since we're only painting the concrete block and the house is old, a darker color would hide some of the flaws more nicely. My dream is to have a yellow stucco house with white trim, similar to the style of this one. As soon as I got over my bubble bursting, off I went to Pinterest to find some pictures I could live with, and ended up finding pictures I kind of fell in love with. 

Original from here.

Original from here.

Original from here

How cute are those first two? I love the gray undertone of the darker brownish paint and the colored front doors, and the fact that they just painted right over the brick. Surprisingly to myself, I went with the lighter color on the third house (on the paneling). It's from Sherwin Williams and it's called Latte. One of the reasons I went with it is because Latte happened to be one of the two colors my brother had independently picked out. Also a major factor is that even though I like the taupe-y colors better, our existing chimney bricks would match Latte a heck of a lot better. We picked out a trim color that wasn't white like I would want, but a few shades lighter than Latte on the same card. 

So here is the after: 

We also jumped on landscaping after we realized we can't really sell a house without it. Patrick called me frantically one morning on his way to work, saying he'd just heard on NPR that houses with landscaping sell 6 weeks faster than houses without landscaping and the value of your house can increase by 14%. That was all it took to convince us to head to Home Depot. A day later, we now have this:

While it's not a huge visual effect (I wasn't about to spend $100 each on the bigger trees/shrubs), it gives the house a little bit more texture. We put in some smaller palms that will grow to 6-10', some boxwoods, a couple gardenias that look hidden in this picture, some aztec grass, and I definitely can't remember the name of the yellow and red plants. I started to keep the tags, then got annoyed because the yard was messy and threw them all away. oops. 

Keep in mind we still need to replace the front door (it's sitting inside the house by the front door all sad and only, just waiting to be used... and we got it on the cheap, thanks bro for having friends who own door companies), and now that the house is painted all nicely, you can really tell that the screens in the front windows need to be replaced! But, I do love the fact that the house looks CLEANER!! and I think it looks longer without all the awful shutters.

Now what to do with my cute little seahorses? I have to keep them....