This New (Old) House ...

As promised ... pictures of the just about completed remodel of the exterior of our home!! It's been sort of a long process - in that we started in January and just finished painting this week (July). At the same time, though, its been a short time in that although it was our goal to get some of this done we had no idea we'd be able to do all of this so soon after moving in!! At the end of this month, we'll have been here a year!

Isn't it pretty?

Paint and shutters just finished this week ...

Back patio (yep, I know there are toys everywhere!)

Closeup of our new front patio where we plan to enjoy many hours of non-summer time sipping drinks and watching our kiddos play with their friends and neighbors. We still needs to put plants in those front planters, but we'll be able to do those soon enough. :-)

... and for reference, here are some "before" pics:

Back patio with peeling paint everywhere and multi-colored splatters on the concrete.

Front yard with some sweet river rock.

Our remodel projects were sped up by a few natural "disasters" experienced here in Phoenix this past year. We had the mother of all hail storms that destroyed our roof last October, so we needed to have that replaced. We opted for a more traditional roof tile instead of the spanish red. We also demo'd EVERYTHINg in the front of the house. My dad and his buddy came over and helped us haul all those old hedges, overgrown cactus, and the other wild plants to the street for bulk trash. Our pool contractor had laborers take all that river rock, those front columns, and low walls, and tons of rock from our backyard to fill in the deep end of our pool and make it into a play pool with a baja step when we had to re-plaster and put in new pool equipment. We also did a smooth texture on the stucco in the front of the home over the old rough "spanish lace" existing stucco. AND, we replaced all the fascia before we did the roof and new paint. The previous owners of this little gem hadn't painted anything in over 15 years. You can only imagine the shape the wood and peeling stucco were in after baking that long in the hot, Phoenix sun.

It's been quite the project getting the outside of our house remodeled and I've spent countless HOURS with all the different contractors, insurance adjusters, etc. but she's DONE! We're so grateful and pretty happy with the results. I'm the queen of second guessing decisions so there are a few things yet I might do-over a bit, but the benefit of this project taking SIX MONTHS is that we had a lot of time to think about it all. Ha ha!

Now ... time to get the inside dialed in and hang those pictures, not to mention make my 9 month old a proper nursery! :-)