House Update & Halloween!

Sooooooooooo, been a while since I posted but that’s because there has been TONS going on! First and foremost, my PORCH!!!!

Anyone who has been with me a while knows that I have dreamed of a front porch. You can take a girl out of the South, but she will still want to sit on the porch, drink tea and chat with the neighbors!!

I first posted about my porch ideas just over a year ago here.

Just for perspective, here’s our house just after purchase last year:

I LOVE my house!!!! But, I didn’t love the ancient overgrown shrubs out front, including the awkward square guy right in front (I called it the brownie bush, because it’s totally square and flat like those box-o-brownies you can get at Sam’s or Costco and cut up to serve). It was also kind of awkward that the front door opened into the dining room. That basically meant no entryway and a squished dining table that the door almost bumped into!

So, we went through the craziness of getting a billion variances approved from the city (ok, not a billion, but it felt like it sometimes!), got a contractor, save up our pennies and now we have a porch!!!

Porch addition, pre-new door installation
Back of the house minus siding
New siding!

We are so excited to have new vinyl siding! We choose ‘oxford blue’ as the color and plan to add shutters, probably in the spring after we have time to shutter-shop.

We got to go shopping for a new front door, which was super exciting! There’s a lot to consider when buying a door that you don’t really think about until you have to shop for one. Seriously, I think it took us an hour to pick out new handle/locks! We went with the Blakely door from Jewlden:

Blakely door

It’s decorative, but not froo-froo. Perfect!

And all that got finished up just in time for us to do some super-last minute Halloween decorating yesterday!

First, we dug out the stump of the brownie bush (cut down by our contractor), and found something spooky:

Remnants of the brownie bush!

Then, we outlined a pathway to the door, since we don’t have a new sidewalk yet:

Walkway to the front door

And we couldn’t help but add some creepiness to that new door:

Hope you had fun decorating for Halloween, I sure did!!!!!