happy be-lated fall & halloween

Ready for a little show and tell? I finally sat down at my computer for an extended camera dump & edit of photos.  My main motivation was the rumor that snow is threatening (dismal looking clouds in the sky) which makes taking exterior photos of green things & gardens difficult.  

Smarter girls would have snapped shots of the house during the beautiful warm months when the flowers & trees were in their prime. But I've been too busy fixing things to be smart. 

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I mentioned here that we were doing a little updating on the outside of the house. You know: scraping, painting, building, gardening, etc.   Yeah, there was a whole lot of all the aforementioned.  

The original exterior was in pretty bad cosmetic shape.  The paint was chipping and peeling not to mention an undesirable shade of sticky-note yellow.  There were rotting boards and pillars in need of replacing and the front garden was disastrously placed with dead foliage, heaps of decorative rocks mixed with weeds and grass overgrowth.   

Knowing all that needed to be done, we set about the task: we scraped & sanded, patched & primed, built & painted, dug up and re-built our way to a new digs, complete with new fixtures, decor & my obsessive need for a burnt orange front door! Our original plan was to tackle the outside of the house a few more years down the road but things weren't going to last that long.

Side note: One of our goals working on our 30+ yr. old home has been to provide it with some character (read: cozy) using colour & landscaping, to soften the linear lines & draw ones eyes away from the front load garage - something I'm hoping we have achieved. (And yes, I realized the roof has to go...but that will have to wait a bit longer).  

From old:

{photo retrieved from realtor's website}

to new:

yes, much cozier. Ready for your visit...come on by.