Day 25 - Curb Appeal, Outdoor Spaces

It's Day 25 of the 31 Days to a Clutter Free Home series already. This month is quickly coming to an end! And here I am skating in at the last minute at 10p.m. with this post...my apologies, but I was off this evening helping a friend de-clutter. Such a fun time!

In case you haven't figured it out... I love houses. I love driving through the countryside, looking at  houses and imagining the families that live inside. After years of studying homes, I've begun to see a trend. Usually when you see a house like this...immaculately kept yard and trimmed landscaping...

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...you can about guarantee that the residents are over 60 years old, are retired and care a lot about how their home looks. It seems like the older generation really takes a lot more pride in their homes.

And then you see a place like this...

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And you guess that Cousin Eddie from the National Lampoons movies lives there.

When we started renovating our home and preparing to list it, I pointed out several examples of homes to David and explained to him that when people drove past our house I wanted them to guess we were 65-year-olds living here not 20-somethings.

So we attempted to undo 8 years of neglect by us (the 20-somethings). We put on a new roof, ripped out the overgrown bushes and replaced them with less intrusive landscaping, installed new exterior doors, repainted the shutters, wrapped the facia boards in aluminum,  had new gutters installed, and restained the deck. Read more about all that here.

Here's a before and after:

Much better, huh?



I wanted some porch furniture but wanted to keep it pretty simple and un-cluttered. We just got a couple small chairs for the front porch and my mom made those two planters for us.

We also did a few other things to improve the appearance and reduce clutter on the property. We tore down the "hillbilly attached garage" a.k.a. carport that we had butted up against the house. It was nice since we don't have a real garage but was definitely an eye sore.

We removed a split rail fence by the driveway and several small scraggly trees. 

Dave also trimmed a lot of branches that were close to the house and really improved the curb appeal. Since we no longer had a working chain saw, he just used a reciprocating saw. Gotta work with what you have, I guess!

We also replaced the paver walkway out front with a new concrete sidewalk.

In the back of the house, we tore off the satellite dish and wood stalls that we didn't even use and the deck that was in disrepair and replaced it with a concrete patio.

Unfortunately this picture was taken when we still had a few projects going on (painting furniture and seeding grass), but you get the idea. The new patio is a huge improvement.

We just love dining outside on our new picnic table! Read more about the picnic table makeover here. We got it for just $55 on Craigslist.

Take a look around your property. Does it look like senior citizens live there? In this instance, that would be a good thing ;) Is there anything that you could easily do this weekend to really make the place look better? Throw away some trash? Put away the lawn mower? Or donate some of the kids' outdoor toys to Goodwill? Anyone ready to get busy beautifying their place before winter?