Exterior Paint, Before and After

You may notice that I've changed the photo on my header. When I started my blog, I borrowed the facade of another...

...Cambridge Greek Revival. I'm happy to be able to retire that photo and use an image from my own house.

When you last saw the house after the columns were installed, this is what it looked like.

A coat of paint went a LONG way to unite all the different materials and colors.

This is what it looks like as of this morning.

Isn't the difference amazing?

I don't think I've ever shown this photo. This is what house looked like when I bought it.

I did a lot of simple projects, always working on the ugliest thing. I replaced the wrought iron posts at the front porch, repainted the foundation, removed the chain link fence, installed a new cedar picket fence, planted a few shrubs, painted the ugly aluminum door and moved the main power line that ran down the front of the house. The cedar fence was quite expensive but the rest of the projects were done as weekend projects for relatively little money.

All of these projects resulted in the house you saw when I was applying for my variance in April.

(Click on any of the photos to enlarge.)

And here is the house today.

Remember this view?

The paint totally integrated the original shingles into the new work...and saved me a lot of money.

The beadboard ceiling is painted sky blue. (I'm not sure why the crown molding is painted blue. I wouldn't have done that and I'll probably change that.) Just waiting for the new light to be installed.

And all the old wood trim on the pediment was scraped, primed and is now looking really great. (The "Head of the Charles" crew races are taking place on the Charles River this weekend and I just happened to catch a plane pulling an advertising banner in this photo.)

Here's another old photo of the house when I bought it. This shows the old deck railings and the handicapped ramp that was attached to the back porch along with a sidewalk that ran across the entire yard to the front door.

You've seen before what I did with that space.

This is that same view today.

I had to exclude the back porches from this phase of the overall project and they're looking a little tired and sagging but a coat of paint should go a long way to helping them blend in.

The porch ceilings are beadboard and were quite water damaged under the old vinyl siding but hours of scraping and priming by the painters have really cleaned it up. See why I was worried about color of the primer? It's WAY off from the color I chose.

Here is the pilaster at the back corner of the house. The upstairs deck railing was too short to reach the pilaster after the three layers of siding were removed so we added a post and tied it in. It's good enough for now.