Before: Here is a picture I took of the house two months before we bought it. It was taken in July, so the green stuff was at its peak. I wish I had a picture of it the day we closed!! The weeds were taller than Paul in places.

Shortly after we moved in, we took off the shutters from around the front door because I thought they looked weird, only to discover that it was the house’s original color underneath (yellow). It remained like that for the next 18 months because after a while, you don’t even notice the flaws anymore.

Over the winter, I started noticing the shutter colors in other houses in the neighborhood, and I realized that very few houses had the same color for the shutters and the window frames. I thought two different colors would really help set the windows apart – before they just looked weird, in my opinion. After taking a careful survey of house colors in my neighborhood (especially the houses that caught my eye) and consulting with many people, I decided to go with black shutters. I also needed to touch up the paint around the front door. Here is the result:

What we did:
* Painted the shutters and the railing by the front door black.
* Painted the entire front section of the main level of the house. I was just going to paint around the door, but the paint was so slightly off in color that it looked better to paint all the way across. It really brightens up the house!
* Painted the front stoop to match the house.

I noticed a few things about the house when I was up close, painting. For one, the color used to be yellow. The shutters used to be teal green. I am pretty sure the brick section was the original brick color until the previous owners painted the house green in 2006. (I’m currently researching ways to get paint off brick – I’d love to return it to that original state, since I love, love the look of brick on a house.) I think at one point, brown was an accent color, since it is the color of one of the stoops in the carport and the stoop outside the sliding glass door in the back.

We spend most of our time trying to just control the landscaping in the front yard, so really not much else has changed.

You can read all our front yard posts here.