House Before and Afters

I have been wanting to show some of the before and after pictures of our new house.  I figure it would make for a really long post to show you all of it at once, so I think I will post a new room each week.  Today's post... The Exterior! When we bought the house we knew that the outside was in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint.  Apparently you have to paint your house more often in Corpus than most places...i think its because of all the salt around here...not too sure.  But, there was a chalky build-up on the outside of the house, meaning it was time to paint again.  We found a guy that had been doing work at Austin and Kylie's new house and he had a very reasonable quote so we went with him.  He wanted to get started right away, so we had a very short time to think about what colors we wanted.  I started driving around the neighborhoods and found a house that I loved the colors of.  (Mallory, I know I'm not supposed to end that sentence with a preposition, but I didn't know how else to end it! :) ) I had our guy, Steve, drive by it to see it and he jumped out of his car and used this cool gadget that he got from the paint store that tells you what the name of the paint is to get a pretty exact match.  So he matched the colors and started painting the next day!  I was really scared when they started painting, but after they finished the facia (sp?) boards it started coming together.

Before

During

After

The landscaping was in really good shape when we moved in.  The previous owners definitely kept up with everything and took pride in their yard.  However, the painters didn't have the same feelings towards the plants :(  They had to cut them back off of the house a lot and butchered some of the plants, and the ones that weren't butchered they sprayed with their bleach/water mix that they used to power-wash the house.  We've tried hard to nurse the plants back to health.  We had a few casualties, but we are still working on the rest.  My favorite part of our backyard is the large grapefruit tree that is close to ready to harvest...I can't wait!  I'll have to post some pictures of it when they start changing colors.  Stay tuned next week for the living room!