Our Exterior Home Remodeling Journey

This post is about our exterior home remodeling journey.

Our home was built in the late 70s and I’m pretty positive it’s a greek revival style home (if you’re an architectural expert and know better, let me know). All in all, I love our home’s exterior but sometimes it feels like a giant box and while the giant columns are impressive, I’m having a hard time finding inspiration pics of similar homes that I really love, the large columns and overhang is hard to style.

What Was Our Home’s Exterior Like When We Bought the House?

When we bought our home the facade is as it is now; natural brick with black shutters. A beautiful facade without much added character. The yard had zero landscaping, not even a bush. Well, it did have a few pretty trees in the front, but that’s it.

So pretty but I slowly have learned how long landscaping/plants cost.

Even though our garage was pretty basic (and dirty) it was such an upgrade from our starter home in Florida and we loved it.

We loved the flat big backyard!

The Handsome Home’s Exterior in 2024

This is kind of embarrassing to show you the current pics so first let me remind you that we’ve been through A LOT in the last 8 years… 5 years of our son having PANS and his care being absolutely consuming and then 3 years of gutting, remediating, and working on re-building our home.

Exterior Home Remodeling of the Front of the Home

Our grass has died so that’s unattractive but we did plant a few trees and bushes in the front. Here’s what I’ve added so far:

• 3 White camellia bushes
• 1 Gem boxwood that was supposed to be round and small but has just stayed tiny and meh.
• 2 Emerald green arborvitae. These have stayed healthy but haven’t grown much taller.
• Daffodil bulbs
• Lined one side of the sidewalk with monkey grass (but it’s not the color I wanted and there are bald spots).

The front before our door refresh.

The front after the door refresh.

Other than the plants, we recently refreshed the door with paint and new hardware. It’s not a huge change but we did spend a ton of time replacing weather stripping, door sweeps, and cleaning and sealing under the threshold. This was a minor aesthetic upgrade but it still feels good that it’s done and the door is safer now (cleaned mold under threshold and gaps letting air in).

We replaced the garage door and I trimmed around it in black. The idea when we did this was to turn it into a photo studio for my husband but as you can see it is currently a storage room. Womp Womp. Obviously we will get to renovating the room but I’m still very happy with the garage conversion.

Future Plans for Our Exterior Home Remodeling

Front Porch Area Plans

Thanks to the wonders of Photoshop I can pretty accurately envision what my the front porch area of my home could look like in the future. I feel like this is a giant step towards my French chateau goals.

Takeaways:

• Lots of Boxwoods. In planters and in the ground.
• Fancy planters
• Some more arbor vitae or topiaries.
• Painted brick and shutters
• Window boxes
• Tile the front porch with a low contrast checkered pattern (smaller scale than in pic) or a mosaic or field stone… something…
• Replace ugly concrete walk way with some sort of cobblestone or what not- this seems like a big job so it will probably be one of the last things we do.
• Lavender! Lavender can look ugly when it dies so I would want to figure out some sort of winter plant to soften the area when the lavender dies in the winter.

Back Yard Plans

Stephanie from Southern Garden Solutions drew up these plans for our backyard before we found mold and our whole life was put on hold. I’m SOOO excited for the day when we can finish this project.

The back is all blackberries and blueberry bushes and then the garden itself will be our little oasis and surrounded with strung bistro lights.

More to Come On Our Exterior Home Remodeling

This is what I’ve come up with so far but I will continue to update this post as we make changes and make plans. I have such big plans for the inside and outside of our Handsome Home. On a limited budget and with 5 kids this is going to take a long time but you know what, that’s ok because this is an exciting journey and because time allows my taste to slowly change as I add elements so that my home will hopefully become both timeless and also thoughtfully unique instead of a fading trend.

Do you have any ideas for our exterior home remodel?