House-Front Fix-Up

When we bought this house last June, we knew there were quite a few things we wanted to change, and the front of the house...cosmetically, was one of them.  Last year, we mostly focused on indoor projects, like flooring and kitchen and painting.  FINALLY, this spring, we are getting to the front of the house, and it feels fantastic!  Let me show you what we've done so far:

This is the home before we purchased, sometime in late March of last year.  There is quite a bit of landscaping to the South side and back of the house, but absolutely nothing in the front.  And we hated those bushes underneath the two garage windows on the left.  And when we first moved, we both hated that shaggy tree in front of the window on the right.

 From another angle.

The first thing to go were those ugly, prickly bushes, blech.  And that shaggy tree on the right had a pretty significant hair cut.  So our poor house looked like this all winter long, ugh, I know.  We kind of had the super ugly house on the street for a while.

 I have a friend at work who is professionally re-doing her front and back yard, and she actually gave us that pavers from her back patio she had torn up, so so SO generous!  Once I got them and saw how thick they were, I knew we were going to put a raised flower bed in under these windows.

And this window also, around our not-so-shaggy tree!  Two of them, curved, there are so many harsh angles in the front of this house, so curved was the way to go.

 Kristoffer was such a sport, we did these raised paver beds right in the thick of my pregnancy gross-ness, so I was pretty much good for supervising.  Which I hated.  I'm a very hands on project person, and it killed me that I couldn't help as much as I wanted.  But he did a fabulous job!  Here is the front paver bed.

 Another angle.

Then we decided that the windows really, *really* needed some sprucing up.  There was absolutely NO window treatments or framing, so we made our own frames!  Kristoffer cut the wood, we both assembled, I painted and he hung them up.

 Here are the frames on the windows, so pretty!!!  At this point, I was really excited to actually see the changes we had been hoping for.

And then we bought some plants for our boxes!  Well, the front one at least.  This is after of course we filled them with fill dirt and a good topsoil.

 We purchased the Euonymous bushes at Home Depot and two flats of different perennials at a local small greenhouse.  They look absolutely gorgeous.  Those Euonymous bushes will fill in nicely and be about two feet high and wide, and the perennials we bought will be perfect ground cover, and maybe spill over the side of the flower bed a little, that will be so pretty!

 On the North side of the house just around the corner next to the garage, I bought two climbing clematis plants.  Hopefully they will grow up the side of the house a little, and I'm hoping we can build a small pergola/arbor to attach above the garage for them to grow on also.

And, the piece de resistance....SHUTTERS!!  We made our own shutters from narrow cut cedar fence planks that we sanded, stained and sealed, and Kristoffer mounted them the other day.  They absolutely make the house look 100% adorable!  Like the eyelashes of our house, bright eyed, open, welcoming, we LOVE them.

We are so SO happy with the changes we've made so far.  It's been a ton of work, but totally worth it, and now I don't feel like we have the ugly house on the street anymore, wohoo!  We are still planning more landscaping to the actual front yard, which will be coming soon, and we are super stoked to soften up the harsh angles on the plain front area, it will look fab.