gray + navy = gravy

Now that we have the front yard landscaping, privacy fence, and hog panel gate out of the way there is only one thing left to do. Repaint the exterior of out little bungalow. Now don't get us wrong, we actually really liked the mint color, but the rust colored screens and railing weren't really working. And honestly, the mint had seen better days and was peeling up in several areas.

We knew that we wanted to go a lot darker, something really moody and modern that would be a nice contrast against our cedar fence. So after zillions of paint swatches, and taking our fan decks around town to color match some local shops that we really liked, we finally settled on the following colors. 

We both use Sherwin Williams on most of our projects at work (and with our trusty designer discount) using it at home was a no brainer. For all of the paint bases we used SW Duration Exterior paint in a semi-gloss finish, since it is known to hold up over the years against the weather and also fights off mold and mildew (and semi-gloss is great against rain and general cleaning). For the overall paint color we chose SW Sea Serpent which is sort of a dark grey / navy or GRAVY as I like to call it. For the trim we wanted a nice bright contrast so we we chose SW Extra White. For the porch ceiling we wanted to keep with the traditional style of our 1930 home and used SW Porch Ceiling Blue. Legend has it that this color keeps wasps from nesting. Derek had this porch ceiling color at his old King William house when we were dating and there were never any wasps, so here's hoping! For the door we wanted something fun and punchy and went with SW Funky Yellow.  

We had every intention of repainting the house ourselves, but the intense amount of prep work is what held us back for so long. There were a lot of areas on our clapboard siding that had rotted through and needed to be replaced. Several boards were warping due to water damage and the house shifting over the years. Old house probs.

With everything going on with my family and with us both working full time jobs, we knew we had to call in the professionals for this project. I know. it went against every bone in our bodies to not do this ourselves. But if we did attempt this on our own, we were doomed to face the next 12 weekends scraping and painting. And let's face it. It's over 100F out.  So after meeting with several different painters, we ended up going with FraVa Services. They were able to start within the same week and their team immediately got to work with the prep portion of the project. Lots of scraping, power washing, and caulking. We requested that they caulk in between each board because let's be honest, we have no idea when (if) that has ever happened. And we are slowly trying to seal up this house.

Disregard my poor sat on cactus. I bet he only did that once!

So. Much. Scraping.

Things like this were replaced. Lot's of bandaids on this house, let me tell ya!

Since FraVa was more of a general contractor than a painter, we also had them repair this big fat bandaid of a roof in our backyard. What in the world. Oh and more scraping.

We also had them replace the posts holding up our Leaning Tower of Pisa porch roof. 

We had them use a tinted primer since the color was going to be so dark, which was SW Exterior Latex Wood Primer. We requested that two coats of primer be used since there had been so much exposed wood after all of the scraping. 

After everything was primed twice, they started with the actual color. Oo la la!

Meanwhile, as the painters were doing their final touch ups, Derek was busy painting the front door SW Funky Yellow. He removed the hardware and carefully taped off the windows in the door, and used a foam roller, which only took two coats. 

Okay and now for the very best part. The before and afters!

Why yes, that IS our front porch separating from the house. More on that later. Back to the pretty afters.

We still need to repaint the back door, but we can't decide if it should also be SW Funky Yellow or stay white. 

Okay let's get one last look at the front. Ahhhhh SO much better right?

We plan to eventually replace the railing and columns because curly-q's just aren't us, but that will be much later on when it gets a little cooler out.

Making That Curb Appeal More Appealing

Oh hey, remember me? Apologies for the radio silence, we had a bit of a family emergency at the start of the New Year, and are honestly just now getting back on our feet again. In the meantime we've been slowly working on our little bungalow whenever we get a chance. And with summer officially starting this week, what better time to share with your our landscaping bonanza? 

I call it a bonanza because I went into the project with the following range of emotions "how hard can it be?" "why did we wait until it's 100 out to start this project?" "I'm so excited to finally have a decent curb appeal" "bags of dirt are SO heavy" "you can get fitbit steps for tilling soil? Let's do this!". You get the idea. So just as a little refresher, this was the current state of our curb appeal.

Woof. 

Before getting started we knew this:

1. We live in San Antonio, and it rarely rains so we need drought tolerant plants.
2. We wanted a minimalist aesthetic with low maintenance.
3. We hate unruly rose bushes.
4. We wanted to stand out on our block.

We sketched out a few ideas. Naturally. 

We decided to have a large planter bed on each side of the sidewalk with crushed limestone as the filler. Each bed would include a rectangular cedar planter framed in angle iron along with some round metal planters in varying heights. Derek designed all of the planters and built them in our shop. For the round planters,he picked up some 1/4" thick 20" diameter steel pipes from our local metal salvage yard and cut them in random sizes so that we could stagger them and add a little height to the overall look. Each cut took about 45 minutes. Phew!

We picked up some metal edging from Lowe's to block out each area that would be receiving the crushed limestone. These will eventually be replaced with 6" plate steel considering the standard garden edging isn't really holding up like we hoped it would. Inside each "bed" we manually tilled up the soil to essentially kill any grass, weeds, rose bushes, etc.

This. Was. So. Hard. 

Once the soil was tilled and our arms were about to fall off, we laid down sheets of weed block followed by a thick layer of sand. This would suffocate anything from trying to grow other than where we wanted it to. We raked the sand and stomped on it it so that it was nice and compact. I mean you can see that weeds are literally growing through our porch steps, so we knew how stubborn these suckers would be.

We ordered a cubic yard of crushed limestone from Keller Material who delivered it first thing in the morning in the cutest little dump truck. I'm sure our neighbors hated us that day. They poured it all in our drive way and we shoveled it and wheelbarrowed it into place. 

This. Was. Also. Really. Hard.

I should also remind you that it was literally 100 degrees out when we decided to tackle this project. See those two little Nalgenes on the porch? Hydration is key.

We started placing some of the round planters first and played with them a bit until we were happy with the look. 

Then we brought in the large cedar planters and placed them in each bed. We also picked up some 18" pavers from Home Depot to connect our driveway to our sidewalk. This required more tilling, leveling, and sand. Who needs to workout when they can just haul pavers all day? Yikes.

That was all day one. Day two was plant day! We went to a couple nurseries around town and looked at the different drought tolerant plant options, asked all of the necessary questions, and then made a game plan. I did a quick sketch laying out what types of plants would be going where. It was sort of like a plant shopping list. The types of plants we had planned to get were a little expensive, so I wanted to make sure we didn't go overboard, and only stuck to the list. 

While our plants started out small, we wanted them to eventually root into the ground. Since we had just completely blocked off the soil with our weed block and sand, we cut slits into the areas that would be under each plant. That way weeds and grass would still be blocked from growing, and our plants would be able to root as deep as their little hearts desired. 

We also filled each planter with extra bricks we had lying around so that we didn't waste a bunch of soil on filling them.

We planted each plant according to their individual instructions (and whatever I could find online), and watered them accordingly. For drought tolerant plants you have to water them a lot while they acclimate to their new home, but after they are rooted and happy you just let nature take care of them, it's pretty great!

In case you forgot where we came from. Let's just take one last look down memory lane at how our little bungie was when we first moved in.

I can't even. 

Do you want to know the quickest way to meet your neighbors? Have a garage sale. But the second quickest way is to do some landscaping or really any exterior home improvements and they are the first to come over and watch you slave over your yard, and ogle at your fresh curb appeal. We've caught several randoms drive by and snap photos, and that's compliment enough for me!

We ended up straying from the plant plan a teensy bit based on availability but ended up with the following from left to right: rosemary (cedar planter), foxtail fern (pipe), blue agave (pipe), yellow lantana (cedar planter), aloe (limestone), pencil cactus (short pipe), prickly pear cactus (tall pipe).