Exterior Progress

My friend pointed out recently that a lot has happened to the exterior of our house that I haven’t shared on the blog. If you’ve been following along for a while, you may recall that we painted the exterior of our house (we DIY’d it!) and got our roof replaced this summer. We also painted the exterior doors and installed new outdoor lights. There’s a blog post on the black outdoor farmhouse lights we were considering at the time. The exterior is still not done, but we have come a loooong way and pretty much have our dream white farmhouse with a metal roof now!

Let’s take a look at some before and afters, shall we?

Not a huge difference, right?

Haha just kidding. The “way before” photo is what the house looked like when we saw it for the first time. We knew right away that it would look cute if it were a white farmhouse with a metal roof. I explained the whole backstory in my introductory blog post about the house, but the house was bank owned and had been vacant for a while. During the stressful, drawn-out period we were under contract, the bank did some work to the house including painting the exterior.  Of course, we had zero say in anything so we watched in loathing as they painted the house a beige-y hue. Total bummer. We knew eventually we’d have to re-paint the house.

Here’s the progress after the siding was painted and installed a new front door. Already much better. 

And here’s what it looked like after the brick and the bottom level were painted. 

Even better, but definitely not a white farmhouse and we knew changes were in the future.

Enter the New Roof

The shingle roof was really old and we knew it would be one of the first things we’d have to replace after closing. We chose a metal roof primarily for the aesthetic, but metal roofs last forever so we’ll likely never need to replace the roof again. It was significantly more expensive than replacing the shingles would have been, but it was worth it. When we were finally on the roofer’s schedule, we decided it was a great opportunity to go ahead and paint the house. Painting the house while the old roof was still on meant that we could worry less about getting paint on the roof and we didn’t have to do as much taping off since all those shingles would be removed. We saved time and effort and didn’t have to stress over the horror of getting paint on a brand new roof. We saved a ton of money painting the house ourselves. Hiring it out would have cost several thousand dollars. We already owned a paint sprayer and pressure washer so our investment was limited to the paint and the heavy equipment rental, all in all about $2k and 4 full days of hard work, in two phases…in the Florida summer heat. The second story was our main concern prior to the new roof install, so we did that first. It took longer than expected since we have about 22 windows on the top story alone, that all had to be taped off. We didn’t finish painting the bottom story of the house until after the new roof was done. But I’m happy to report, we finally have an all white farmhouse. 🙂 

That’s what it looked like after we finished painting the top. That photo was taken from 30′ up in the air on the boom lift.

The following week the roofers got to work. The first crew came out and removed all of the old shingles, repaired some of the wood and laid the roof underlayment. The metal crew followed them a few days later and spent 10 days installing the new galvanized metal roof. 

After the roof was done, we finished the exterior painting and installed black outdoor sconces.

Viola!

Our White Farmhouse

Don’t you just love my little models? 

I chose black accent doors and black outdoors sconces for the exteiror of our white farmhouse. I love the way the black and white look together. 

So here is where we are today. We have definitely come a long way but there’s still a long list of things to do to the exterior. We need new windows. See the ugly brown frames on the old ones? Yuck! We have about 44 windows so needless to say we won’t be doing that anytime soon, and when we do, we’ll probably have to do a few at a time haha. We need to do the landscaping but we’re waiting to do that until we have gutters installed. Before we can have gutters installed we have to install a wood strip around the perimeter under the roof lip, which is a weekend of work and another boom lift rental. We also need to replace the ceiling of the porch. Currently, it’s drywall and we’d like to do vinyl. We also need to replace a few boards on the porch and then stain it. I accidentally ordered one less outdoor sconce than we needed, so when we get the extra it will need to be installed on the far right side of the front of the house. And don’t even get me started on the tree work we need to done.

Anyone wanna come over and knock all that out for me? 😉

For anyone curious, the shade of white we used on the exterior is Sherwin Williams Alabaster and the black doors are Sherwin Williams Tricorn. The rugs are from Crate and Barrel and outdoor lights are Restoration Hardware.

I’ll share a more detailed final reveal when and if we ever finish the exterior but I’m excited to hear what you think about the updates!