house painting! whoo hoo!

Tomorrow the house painters come, and start painting the exterior of our house! I'm quite excited about that.

I chose the same color that my aunt and uncle's house is painted, because I love their house, and it is also stucco. That's our sample swatch up there. Right now it's that beige color on the left (but in need of a repaint) and it will be the color on the right (Glidden Thicket ... they no longer make it, but I was able to get a reasonable match at MyPerfectColor.com).

All the trim and shutters will be bright white.

This autumn we got a new front door. We also had the front porch railings rebuilt (the wood was all rotted), and I had our carpenter add a tongue-and-groove ceiling to the porch to hide the ugly rafters. He rebuilt our pergola out back, which had also rotted over the years.

Here is the new pergola. It's much sturdier than the old one.

Here's the new porch ceiling. This used to be buggy, yucky rafters.

Here are the new porch railings. After the house is painted, we will get new rain gutters and have the front porch faced in brick to match the walkways. No more painting the front porch every year. Yay. :)

Since I knew we were paving the porch, I didn't bother to paint the concrete last summer, and it's looking pretty gross.

Here's a nice view out front when Tom was hanging the new door.

Come on in!

There had been some trim glued onto the stucco around the door that looked cheap and bad, and hid some spiders that came out at night and freaked me out when we'd come home late. He ripped it right off, and sure enough, look at this spider egg sac hiding underneath. Gross.

We're replacing the light below with this one (if it fits ... I measured but I'm not positive ... it might stick out too far) after the painters leave.

This is the new light. Hopefully it's not too big. Although as I look at it, I think it probably is. I can just imagine all the very tall people in my life walking out of our house and getting karate chopped in the head by this if it sticks out. I might need to keep looking.

Here's the new front door.

The windows make it brighter inside, which is nice.

We spent our initial effort on this house fixing the "systems" when we first moved in here seven years ago (it needed a new roof, and we've since installed new air ducts and a tankless water heater) and we also worked on getting the inside comfy. It's fun to be finally getting around to the outside of the house!