Let's back up this tour

Let's back up this house remodeling home tour train, and head back outside for just one more post. I feel like there was so much work done outside that it deserves a little more love.

I can't get enough of this before picture, it has been so long since it looked like this that I have forgotten. My husband and I went to a dinner last week and sat across from a couple that we did not know. Through small talk conversation, we learned that they looked at our house 5 times while it was sitting on the market, trying to figure out how they could remodel it and make it different. Obviously, they never pulled the trigger and we did one month later. What a small world we live in. She kept saying, "it was priced so low and we really wanted to make it work, but we just could not envision it to be anything but what it was." I found it so interesting, because when it came down to it, it was just a brick box.

Remember, we did this over a 3 year period of time. None of these changes happened over night. First we bricked in the paneling between all the windows, took the roof off half the house to go up with a playroom addition, and then we added dormers. Next we painted the entire thing (when in doubt, paint the brick) huge difference! The big window needed to go and new eBay bought doors were installed (we paid less than cost for the doors). We heart ebay.

A home seems more charming to me with some kind of a porch. The cute carpenter designed this portico from one that he had seen and liked in a magazine. We had leftover hardwoods from the inside of the house that he installed on the ceiling of the portico. It wasn't enough material to do anything else with and we didn't want it to go to waste.

Though the house was a thousand times more attractive on the outside, it needed a little more. It was screaming for some shutters.

Have you ever checked the cost of wood shutters? They are outrageous, so we built our own. Board and Batten shutters are incredibly easy to build. If anyone out there actually cares to get a tutorial on how to make your own shutters...leave me a comment and I will nicely ask the cute carpenter to write one. I am sure he would be more than pleased to share what he learned through the process.

And now we are back to where we were when we started, and I feel better about explaining a little more of what was involved in adding curb appeal. Click here if you care to go back to day 1. See you on Wednesday.