A Front Porch to Match

Before we even closed on our home, we immediately wanted to tear down the 60's era faux wrought iron supports on the porch and bring the facade back to its original state. We did some research on the home, but failed to locate any images from before they were installed. Luckily our style of home has many similarities to others in the neighborhood which still have their original porches. (The home three doors down from us is nearly identical, and it's original porch is intact) We used those as a guide and built ourselves a brand new porch that looks like it could be original. We also swapped in an antique light fixture and developed a new paint scheme (which we are still not quite done with so try and ignore the bright red trim on the top - that will soon be the darker shade of green). We are very excited to see the house regain its original identity and still can't believe what a difference it has made. There is still work to be done to finish this project (trim at the tops of the columns, paint, stair railing, etc.), so stay tuned...

Backyard Patio.

Our backyard has been basically neglected up until now, apart from the occasional grass cutting to keep the neighbors from calling the city on us we have been focused on the inside of the house since we purchased it last March. We decided to finish what we could inside in time for the enjoyable weather.

We didn't have to many things on our list when it came to getting the yard back in working shape. First was that orange mulch again that the previous owners seemed to love so much. We were able to craigslist it, because you can't throw away mulch apparently. So someone in the neighborhood picked it up for their compost pile. Our yard is not huge so taking advantage of space is a huge priority, so we decided to tuck away the patio against the garage and the back end of the yard would be designated to seating and the bbq. It would also make the view of the garage look a little bit more inviting from the house. We started to dig out the perimeter and found that there was actually a previous concrete slab left over from a prior owner. We found that it was a good size and it would be perfect for our foundation which cut out a ton of work and some money. Probably the one unexpected find that was actually a advantage so us so far. So it ended up being about 11x14 and we went with a "cream city" looking brick in a herringbone pattern to fit the era of the house. There a few details that we need to wrap up still (I feel like I just need to end every post with that statement)

I usually don't put how long things take us on here, because they always take longer then expected but to lay out the entire patio it actually only took us one weekend. It was possibly the quickest most rewarding thing we have done so far. As for the grass through all the digging we had to do, we are attempting to grow weed free grass which is taking a bit longer.