Hoping for Baby B: Landscaping & Home Exterior

This has been so much fun! We have done 99.99% of our home remodel all by ourselves. But we finally gave up the idea of doing our front and back yard landscaping & house exterior ourselves. We are loving watching others do the hard work for once :) I should clarify that we are planning to move in 2 years, so we are doing just enough to sell this house.

Apparently our neighbors are super nosy and we are just finding this out 4 years into living here LOL. Our masonry guy and painter/exterior work guy told us that lots of our neighbors would sit out front and watch them work. Too funny. I was pleased to hear that one of our neighbors told our painter how happy he was that we moved in. For 20 years, the house sat there untouched and now we have completely remodeled every part of the house, inside and out.

It feels really good to be done with the house, and to have something we are so proud of.

First, let's go back in time to 2006 when we first moved in... That's baby Apollo on the grass :) The house was original and disgusting. I am so bummed that we didn't snap a photo before we ripped off the fake shutters and replaced the windows. This is the earliest photo we have prior to us moving in and remodeling.

Now, here are some progress photos on the landscaping & exterior work. Warning: there are a lot of them! No really, like hundreds of photos!

FRONT YARD

Dead lawn/weeds, after 3 sprays & 3 weeks - 10.29.10

Sod removal - 10.30.10

Front walkway demo - 10.31.10

Front yard with sprinklers installed & soil prepped - 11.1.10

Front walkway, border is concreted together - 11.1.10

Sod installed!!!!! 11.2.10 = very happy Mrs. B :)

Front Walkway Pavers - 11.2.10

Sod - 11.3.10

Pavers - 11.3.10

View from the front door - 11.4.10

Front walkway - 11.4.10

Pavers on other side of the house - 11.4.10

Driveway - 11.4.10
The concrete guys are using the existing cracks and creating some new cracks, then staining it a mixture of gray colors to match the pavers in the walkway. It should look like a flagstone pattern.

Front patio - 11.4.10
This concrete will have the same treatment & stain as the driveway

Driveway cracks done - 11.6.10

Front patio, cracks started - 11.6.10

Partial driveway stain & ugly white primered house. Eww, look at that swirly trim over the garage. Yuck. - 11.7.10

Driveway stain & seal done - 11.8.10

Front patio, stain & seal done - 11.8.10

Front patio, grout done - 11.11.10

Driveway, grout done - 11.11.10

Now, it's on to the exterior work...

Black temporary warped window trim is gone. Stuccoing the uneven gap under the front windows - 11.12.10

New trim over the garage. No more swirly trim!!! YAY! - 11.12.10

New window trim - 11.12.10

Stucco drying, master window trim done - 11.12.10
Boy, are they good at floating stucco! I did a horrible job originally LOL.

Old, rotted roof trim removed - 11.13.10

Rotted wood trim. Flashing is important for this reason ;)

This corner at our entry is especially bad :/

New flashing, left side of the house - 11.13.10

Underside view of the new wood - 11.13.10

Fixing the bad corner at the entry. Hubby is the shorter one with hair hehehe - 11.13.10

The bad corner not looking so bad anymore. Yay! - 11.13.10

I had to include a picture of the mess they were making. Yes, they clean it up. But I am neurotic when it comes to messes, especially on our new sod. It's been really hard not to pick up everything that lands on the ground the minute it drops, throughout this entire process!

The bad corner repair is done! - 11.14.10

New wood & flashing - 11.14.10

Front of the house. Primer almost done, window trim done - 11.15.10

There was a little hiccup with the paint color. He did a bit of cutting in (it's the purplish-gray along the bottom). We came home that day and I freaked! The gray was almost purple. EEK. Totally the color Nick and I picked too, but not what we thought it would look like! Our painter is a co-worker of mine and a total sweetheart, so no worries. We just picked a more gray gray :)

Eaves are primered - 11.15.10

Trim, eaves & garage door painted Swiss Coffee (white) - 11.16.10

So exciting... PAINT :) It's called Formal Gray - 11.17.10

You can see where they had to float the stucco across the old uneven gap in the wall. It's that darkish stripe under the windows. Our painter is covering it with trim. Otherwise, I would go nuts ;)

It was getting dark out when I got home, so forgive the poor lighting.

The entry - 11.17.10

Ahhh :) Mrs. B is in love. The front with the nice, rounded trim covering the stucco work, and the rain gutters started - 11.18.10

Rain gutters are done. And minus the new patio slider on order, it's all done! - 11.19.10

BACK YARD

Dirt

Dead after 3 sprays - 10.29.10

Leveled - 10.30.10

Back yard with sprinklers installed and soil prepped - 11.1.10

Sod installed! - 11.2.10

Back patio, cracks started for flagstone effect - 11.4.10

Back patio, cuts finished and stained - 11.7.10

Back yard wall. Removed old top bricks - 11.7.10

Back patio stain & seal done - 11.8.10

Back patio, grout done - 11.11.10

Bricks added - 11.12.10

Red brick cap on the wall - 11.12.10

Stucco on the side kitchen window - 11.12.10

Stucco on our small master window - 11.12.10

Stucco on the dog room window - 11.12.10

Stucco on the office/future baby room window - 11.12.10

Ugly metal patio cover - 11.12.10 at 2pm

Ugly metal patio cover, gone! - 11.12.10 at 2:30pm

I was at work till noon and apparently the workers wanted to get into Apollo's fenced area. Nick watched them on our security cameras as they ran in when he went inside his room, and they made this contraption to keep him from coming back out: