Freshen Your Home Exterior Part 1

When we purchased this house, we knew we would have quite a bit of work ahead of us to update this house. An outdoor appearance is very important to us because we enjoy spending quite a bit of time outside. When we first moved in we had a jungle of plants, 30 year old yew shrubs, a rotting deck, little stepping stones from the street to the deck, and quite a few trees scattered in the yard. One day we just went out and started ripping out shrubs and a few of the smaller trees.

I knew immediately that I would not keep the house red. At first I was going to be gray, black and white, but after a year when the time came to paint, I changed my mind. I'm definitely glad I did!

Our first outdoor upgrade consisted of removing the badly spaced stepping stones making a path from the road to the deck. The boys were constantly tracking mud inside from their boots and paws, so I decided we needed a solid paver path.

We began this part by digging out the depth of the pavers plus two extra inches to make way for leveling and chat. It was 24" wide since we had 12" square pavers. After digging our depth, we leveled the dirt from the deck to the road making sure it was a consistent 5" deep. Our pavers were 3" deep, so we filled the path first with 2" of chat, and then leveled the chat making sure the new depth was consistently 3". We then laid the pavers flush to each other using a soft mallet to set them starting by the deck. The two blocks by the curb had to be cut slightly. After the path was level, we filled the blocks in with polymeric sand (sand made for pavers that will slightly harden with water).

The paver project took us a weekend. It could have easily taken us a day of work, but we were not in a rush to finish in one day. This project added so much to our outdoor space and was an easy way to create a solid path!

Our next project was tearing down our rotting deck and replacing it with a solid new deck. It was quite easy to tear the deck apart since the wood was pretty soft and put together with nails. Once the underneath was revealed, we realized the deck was simply sitting on top of the gravel and no anchors were concreted into the ground.

We had to bring in project managers to help rebuild a new deck. We ended up with a bigger deck and wrapped stairs so we can eventually build a round fireplace patio below the deck. The railing is vinyl with metal rods between that had to be assembled, which was a quite easy task with the help of the project leaders.

The last project was changing the color from a faded red to a new vibrant navy. The navy color is Naval from Sherwin-Williams, a popular color for 2020. We used about six gallons of Naval paint for the entirety of the exterior. We repainted the white accents using Extra White exterior paint from Sherwin-Williams. This project took a while because painting the exterior of a home is hard. Don't let anyone ever tell you it's not. However, I love the complete revamp of the color and freshening the white trim.

Part two will be revealed later this summer when we complete landscaping outdoors and stain our new deck. The lumber had to finish being treated for months.

Casa Azul Owner,

Lauren