Beech Street Bungalow: The Exterior

I am so excited to share the progress on the exterior of our home with you!  I have been waiting on this day for a very long time.  After working tirelessly on this home for almost 2 1/2 years, I now smile when I drive up to it.  Although remodeling the inside of our home first was necessary, I often times wished we could switch to the outside for a while to make it look a little better! Even though I knew that so much progress was happening on the inside, it seemed as if the exterior was holding me back from enjoying the transformation.  I am now blown away, I couldn't have imagined our house turning out this pretty.

When we purchased this home, what use to be a screened in porch was closed in with glass to create an extra room.  We knew without a doubt that we wanted to open this space back up.  We thought that a porch this large would not only improve the curb appeal, but provide us with a fun place to entertain!

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Once we removed the glass panes and tore out a few walls, this is what we got!

We loved the open feel our house now had.  One good thing about the porch being covered up all those years was that the floor and ceiling were in wonderful condition!  We did have to replace a few sections of flooring where the porch had always been open, as well as a few places in the ceiling due to water damage. One thing is for sure - restoring an old house is never easy!  The porch ceiling was made of of v-groove.  We looked all over for v-groove to purchase, but couldn't find it anywhere.  I had plenty of bead board left over from our demo days, but no v-groove.  Phillip decided that we would have to just make it ourselves. 

Phillip has plenty of experience making trim to match existing (really old) trim at work.  He said it would be no problem, so he purchased boards and a router blade that would cut a v the size we needed.  We began making v-groove, and boy was that a job.  We had to run each board through the router three times to give the boards the "v-grooves".  Then we had to run each board through the table saw twice.  We had to plane each board down to make it the correct thickness.  By the time we finished making all of the v-groove, I wondered how he did this for a living!  We spent hours recreating boards that would take us 30 minutes to nail into place.  I now understood the time and craftsmanship that goes into historical restorations.     

When we took out the exterior wall on the carport side of the house, we realized that two columns had been removed at some point.  We knew we would need to rebuild these columns, so we started trying to locate matching brick.  I'm not sure if you remember the fireplace blog, but we had a ton of old brick left over from that project.  However, that wouldn't even be enough brick to get started!  If you look at the pictures above, you will notice a patch of brick that obviously looks filled in.  We decided to remove this brick (since it was not original) and thought we could build planters to fill in the space where the brick was removed!

We now had enough brick, so we called a brick mason to come by and rebuild the bases to the columns so that we could keep moving on!  Once the bases were in place, Phillip got to work on building the new columns.  He set up shop right in our front yard!  He has been a trooper throughout this whole process. I bet we have loaded/unloaded his tool trailer a million times in the past two years!  

When we purchased the home, it had aluminum siding on the exterior.  Phillip quickly realized that wood siding was underneath.  He desperately wanted to take all of the aluminum siding off to expose the wood siding, but due to our budget and lack of free time, I resisted.  We were told by multiple painters that we could paint the aluminum siding, it just needed to be cleaned really well first.  We knew that taking the chance of exposing the wood siding could become timely and very expensive if we found problems.  When we uncovered the porch area, however, the wood siding was exposed and it was in beautiful shape!  We decided to expose all of the wood siding just under the porch area so that it would match. (We didn't have enough aluminum siding to cover this area!)

Remember when we turned an existing bathroom (that connected the front bedroom to the enclosed porch) into a closet for the front bedroom?  Well once that wall was framed, Phillip made wood siding to patch this area.

Now that we were starting to wind up the repairs on the exterior of our home, I could start thinking about paint!  For years I have pinned beautiful homes that caught my eye.  As I looked back through those images, I noticed a pattern.  I had a thing for dark blue houses with white trim!  I ran the idea by Phillip and he thought it was promising.  Here are two of the pins that really influenced my decision.  I loved the way the dark blue and bright white looked with the brick and dark stained accents.  Click either picture to visit their original site!

I used a dark blue paint on one project in the house, and was curious how it might look.   I decided to paint a small section on the house to see how I felt about it.  I didn't want anything too blue, or anything with a green tint to it, so this decision was hard!  When the sun hits this particular color, it is a little lighter than I wanted, but I was also afraid to go much darker.  I decided to live with this patch of color for a while to feel it out.  After about a month, we decided to just go with it!
(During this month, we ended up having to put a new roof on our house.  We were not expecting this expense, but are very happy with the result!)

The painters finally arrived and worked their magic!  I tried to take pictures along the way to show the transformation.  

Phillip and I weren't crazy about the brick on our home, so we looked for ways to give it an update.  I didn't want to paint it, but knew something needed to be done.  I found pictures of brick that I liked, and started asking a lot of questions!  Turns out that our painter, one of Phillip's co-workers, said he could do the job!  I showed him the picture on the left, and the picture on the right shows the before and after of the brick on our house.  This technique was just what our out-dated brick needed!

Here is a picture of our house painted, and the brick finished!

Here is a before and after shot of the columns once they were replaced.

Here is a look at the before and after of the area we closed in for a closet.

I knew I wanted a blue(ish) porch ceiling, so I was on the hunt for the perfect color!  The one I ended up choosing had a grey tint to it, but still looked lovely with the house color.  Here is a list of the colors we ended up choosing.

Sea Serpent by Sherwin Williams for the exterior.

Extra White by Sherwin Williams for the trim.

Reflection by Sherwin Williams for the porch ceiling.

These might be my favorite before and after pictures yet!

We are so happy with the way things turned out, and we are so happy to call this house our home.  Now I'm busy dreaming about the landscaping!

​Check out more Beech Street Bungalow renovation stories here!