(Second &) Third Time's the Charm?

Now that Mia and I are into somewhat of a routine I've been getting a major itch to do some projects around the house. But it seems I have lost a bit of my DIY mojo somewhere along the way.

The first project I've been thinking about for about a year now: painting the front door. I even went so far as so try out a dark gray color I already had about a year ago, but I didn't like it. So since then our front door has been light blue with a little swatch of gray paint. Lovely.

I always hated the color scheme of the outside of our house (as seen here). The light gray siding with light blue shutters, and until last year the trim around the windows was two-tone blue and gray (which looked really dingy). Jeff painted the trim white last year and removed the shutters from around the kitchen window (because one was broken), so the only light blue we're left with is the shutters around the bedroom window and the front door.

Oh hey, look how fugly our front door was when we first moved in!

and this is after trying a few different paint colors I already had on hand
(the storm door was replaced a few years ago via Craigslist)

I turned to Pinterest for inspiration for the front door color. I wanted to do something bold and splashy. I thought about yellow (but I considered that when the door is open into the entryway it might clash with the yellowish paint in the walls there), eggplant (worried about resale), charcoal (not enough of a splash), poppy red (too much of a splash?), and finally settled on green after seeing this picture:

obviously from Blueprint magazine

I thought the color scheme seemed preppy and cute.

Not so on my house...

It was just okay from the outside, but truly hideous when the door was open, which it is a lot of the time as we get evening sunlight through the storm door.


So I had wasted $10 on a quart of paint, and I went back to my gut feeling which was to paint the door a rich, dark, charcoal gray. I like it. Is it splashy? Not really. Was it a risk? No. But it no longer looks like an elementary school. So that's something!

next up, I need to replace the ugly blue mailbox

Onto my second project which actually took 3 tries to get just right: hanging curtains in Mia's room.

I had some curtains that I loved from our old apartment, but they did not look good in our existing living room, and since the afternoon sunlight has been creeping into Mia's room through the side of the blinds and right onto her sleeping face, I decided they would work in her room.

On my first attempt I bought curtain rods and spray painted the finials aqua, but as Jeff was hanging them I realized the rods were too short. Ugh. If only I hadn't painted them, they could have been returned. Measure twice, hang once, right? Right. So another $10 wasted.

I ran out and bought longer rods. I learned my lesson and didn't paint them first. Jeff hung (hanged?) them. At first we only did one curtain panel on each window because they are small windows. It worked fine on the window in the corner, but the other window just looked lopsided.


So, on my 3rd try I finally got it right and moved the curtain rod out a few inches on either side and added another curtain panel.

Success!

I think it actually warms the room up considerably.

And since I have no other way to wrap up this post; Look! It's Mia as a penguin!

Landscaping

After we finished the living room and dining room floors, one of the next projects we took on was landscaping in the front yard. Several of the bushes and shrubs around the front of the house were dead or dying (especially those two at the very front of the house pictured below).

Jeff used to do landscaping in the summers during high school and college, so this was one of the projects he was most excited about. The first thing he did was saw off all of the limbs of those bushes. Then he went about the task of digging up the 50+ year old roots. I was at work the day he did this, but I think it involved a lot of muscle and an attempt to wrap them in chains and pull them out with a friend's pick-up truck.


He finally got them out. Here's all the debris on the street in front of our house. It's basically taking up all of our curb space.

Then Jeff selected some grass and different varieties of Juniper. My only desire was to have hydrangea bushes. We had some mulch delivered, and here is what it looked like right after everything was planted:

This is what it looks like about two years later:

And we've done a bit more work around the sides of the house in the past year including planting wild flowers along the walkway, and a digging up another dying bush and replacing it with a peony bush near the front door.

And when we moved in all of these day lilies were clustered together toward the front of the garage, so I spread them out along the the length of the garage, and they finally bloomed for the first time this summer.

Now, the back yard is a whole different story. Maybe someday we will focus on that, but for now we like that we have a bit more curb appeal.