One of the many reasons we moved up the street to this "new" house 14 years ago was because we loved the size of the yard. Our first house had a huge front yard that was really unusable and a tiny back yard that we would cram all our friends and family into for back yard parties. We even had to buy the smallest play structure available at the time from Rainbow to fit the small footprint of our back yard. This house has a huge square yard with the house situated closer to the road and the driveway/neighbors yard/plot line which meant this house had a huge side yard and a back yard that was just as big. At the time the back yard was overgrown and unusable but we could see from our survey that it had lots of potential.
The first thing we did when we moved in was add a fence. Being so close to a busy road the most important thing to us was that our children were safely inside our yard. I think we put the fence in within two weeks of moving in.
Here are a few before and after photos. It's fun to see how much of a stamp we've put on this house. While we've kept the same color of the house for all these years we may have to change it soon as it's starting to fade in some spots. It is currently BM Gloucester Sage. People literally stop and ring our doorbell to find out the color of our house. While we love the color our feeling is that if you're going to pay all that money to have the house painted you might as well be able to tell! We're thinking gray. We fix up our house for ourselves first, for curb appeal second, and to create outdoor living spaces that our family enjoys using.
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| Front of house Before |
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| Front of house After |
While these pictures don't look all that different except that one is at night and one is during the day there were quite a few changes that have happened over the years We had both chimneys removed down to the roofline and completely rebuilt. We took down everything on the front porch except for the roof and Rod rebuilt it with new footings, new decking and new columns. We tore out the old overgrown front gardens except for the most beautiful rhododendron on the right hand side and planted new period specific gardens that won't hide the porch as much. (We did this before we fixed the porch-note to others wanting to undergo a similar project- fix the porch and then the gardens!!) We jackhammered out the old concrete walkway and rebuilt it ourselves with bricks in a herring bone pattern. We had the side steps rebuilt and added our own stone walkway to them. We added a new mailbox and granite post. Since we've owned the house the front doors went from black, to a cranberry color to the current purple color. A lot of pictures get taken in front of those doors. Back to school every September, Halloween pictures, prom, and dance photos and just our girls own photoshoots. I guess our double front purple doors are 214's own "social media moment". We love several things about our front porch: that it is a covered front porch, the robins love it and nest here several times a season, we have a porch swing, the windows go basically floor to ceiling in the front of the house so our dogs can watch us come and go, and of course our purple doors with that beautiful antique glass.
Our side yard was really our only yard when we first moved in. Our back yard was very small and very overgrown. In order to access the yard we had to either go out the front door or out the garage door, into the garage and out another door into the back yard. Not ideal with two small children and another one on the way. When we did the kitchen renovation we quickly rectified this issue with back doors off the kitchen. At a later date we also did a side porch project that involved taking the old side closed screened porch and making it into an open side porch similar to our front porch and thus adding a door from our living room out onto the porch and into the yard. We had this gorgeous 200 year old or older twisted maple in our side yard that really made the yard. It was a giant shade tree on sunny days, and a huge umbrella on rainy days. We could stay outside in the rain for hours under that tree without even getting wet. It was our tire swing tree and the site of many fun family pictures and memories. Over the years we lost branches in microbursts and in other stormy weather. One morning our youngest daughter heard a huge boom and looked out into the yard to see this massive branch filling our yard. We already lost sleep on windy nights with her hovering over our house. If she was losing massive branches at 7:00 in the morning without any wind we knew it was time for this old beauty to come down. We love our side porch for hanging out with coffee and the paper and to sip wine on sunny nights when we want a little shade. The side yard is massive and was the perfect place for our yearly skating rink each winter. This past year we realized how well it fit a 20 by 40 tent for our daughter's graduation party with room to spare for outdoor games.
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| Side porch Before |
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| Side Porch After |
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Yard before above with tree with massive branch down and
after without it. It feels like a completely different yard! |
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| Skating rink turned swimming pool come spring. |
When we added our kitchen addition we basically filled in the hole that was in the back of our house between our living room and garage. This allowed us to have a much bigger kitchen, easier access to our living room and two doors out to our back yard. We put in long back steps to access the back yard and when we realized how hard it was to grow grass back there in the shade with constant use we added a patio. And then expanded it. Then we added a hot tub and a had our friend that is a mason build us a sitting wall for our existing patio. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither was our back yard. We also added a crushed stone and rock path where the dogs constantly ran and wrecked the grass that connected our extended patio to our side porch. We tore out tons and tons of forsythia and cleared out a bunch of small trees to regain our backyard which had become very overgrown. We gained space for a tree house (which since came down in a hurricane), our swing set and used playground mulch to keep the weeds and grass at bay underneath it. We also added another garden. We have since taken out a few more trees and added a raised bed in our playground area. Our kids have outgrown the play structure so we added swing seats to it and will eventually take it down and hope to make that part of our yard into a raised bed garden area. We also got a trampoline (every spring I buy something to add to the yard to get the kids outside and playing again....anything to keep kids young and playing!) And the hot tub was a great addition with teens and preteens. It has been worth every penny for the amount of time we spend in it. We use it constantly for family time and the girls host team parties and birthday parties year round with a hot tub theme! We've even been known to be out there in a blizzard! And we got string lights and hung them above the patio to enjoy year round. We love them in the snow and the last picture is from Halloween night.
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| Back of the house Before |
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| Back of house After (in middle of 2nd patio project) |
Gardens: For some reason in the over 200 years that this house had been lived in there had never been a gardener that lived here. We basically started from scratch with donations of trees and perennials from friends and family and a few plants we moved from our old house. I love gardening and getting my hands dirty and Rod's been known to dig up free bushes in the middle of the night (although he says never again it has happened quite a few times). Thank you Rod! And I love the benefits I reap from all this work. Fresh flowers from trees, bushes and gardens that get us from early spring till late fall. Dried flowers for winter and I even have evergreens to fill my winter planters and window boxes. I've been known to make my own boxwood wreaths from bushes we planted in the yard as well. These gardens have truly been the gifts that keep on giving. My advise to anyone moving into a new house is to plant flowering bushes and perennials early on. The sooner you do it the more years of flowers you have in your future!
The garage before: We had the same exact car but this was the previous owners car in the garage. A friend had heard we were moving and had seen "our" car in the driveway and wondered why we would ever sell a house that was so "us". Turns out we were moving to that house! We realized during the kitchen addition when the garage was closed off to us that if we didn't use the garage in the winter with 3 kids under the age of 5 that we didn't really need it. We used it for a few years but eventually turned it into a game room complete with air hockey table, darts and sometimes a popcorn maker. (Which was a big hit at Kelsey's graduation party!)
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| Garage Before with their car |
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| Garage now as game room decorated for Halloween |
