A facelift

When we bought our house last fall, the front looked like this:

And since then, not really anything has changed.  We pulled out of couple of plants that completely died over the winter, but that's about it.

I knew that I wanted to do something about the front door situation.  The door and the sidelights are black.  Maybe they could be described as "super dark charcoal grey" but essentially they're black.

Here's a (really blurry) zoom in on the picture above:

Aside from the totally blah door color, the porch paint was peeling and it just looked allover sad.

Matt made friends with a painter, who has been doing some work for us (NOT the same painter who did the rest of the house), and before it started raining and didn't stop for a month he got started on priming the sidelights.  We also have a couple of options for the door.

note the peeling paint on the floor boards - and crazy bird's nest above the door

Can you see the difference between the old picture (with the black sidelights) and these (where they've been painted white)?  The top yellow and the bottom yellow are very similar, and in some lights one looks better, and in other lights the other one looks better.  We decided to go with....

The bottom one, Sun Shower! 

that's after only one coat

And before, when you looked up at the porch ceiling, it was pretty splotchy and blah....

... but now we have a fun surprise! 

It's like sunshine and blue sky.  It makes us both so happy when we walk outside.

Here's the pretty, newly-painted floor

But something was missing.  The fire department was going to yell at us.  When the door got painted, we peeled off the graffiti-looking stickers on the door that said our house number.  Even though our house number is on (both sides of) our mailbox, it also has to be on the house, visible from the street.  On the mailbox for the post office people, on the house for the emergency workers.  I bought some metal stick-on numbers from Home Depot and stuck them on between rainstorms this week.

So to save you from scrolling all the way back to the top, here's the before again:

And the after: