Quick and Easy Curb Appeal

You know the phrase "a face only a mother could love" apparently it can apply to houses too.  I quickly realized not everyone saw the same potential that we did in our new home.  One night before we moved we were at the house eating dinner when someone knocked on the door.  Our first visitor?? We were a bit nervous of what kind of "visitors" our house would attract being fairly conspicuous on a main highway.  When Dusty opened the door a young family was on the other side.  They inquired about the building and we explained that it was to become our home.  They were surprised and said that they were planning a Halloween wedding and scoping out venues, and thought that this would be the perfect place, looking as spooky as it does on the outside.  We laughed about it and wished them luck.  When we closed the door I asked Dusty if the house really looked haunted, he just raised his eyebrows at me as if to say "what do you think?"  The next next day I posted some pictures of the house on facebook and someone commented, "Awesome, can I go ghost hunting in there??"  It was confirmed, we had just bought the haunted mansion (without the ghosts).

The majority of the initial work we did was on the inside, while Dusty did spend a significant amount of time knocking down weeds and overgrowth nothing more was done to the "curb appeal" of the property.  One evening, after we were moved in and were burned out from the never ending sheetrock sanding, Dusty came home and announced he was going to paint the shop.  While all of the buildings on the property are in disrepair on the exterior, the shop was in top contention for the shabbiest.  The paint was chipping, the doors were sagging and the roof is 2 different colors.  While paint would not solve all of these problems it would do a lot for sprucing up.  Dusty got a 5 gallon bucket and started mixing the paint we inherited with the building, along with the several partial gallons that we had left over from previous projects.  The mix turned out brownish gray, it was pretty dark so we added a half gallon of white; the final color couldn't have turned out more perfect if we had picked a paint chip.  He spent the evening with the paint sprayer and had 2 coats on the entire building before sundown. 

We brainstormed throughout the evening to use what we had on hand to give the shop a quick and cheap facelift.  The next morning we used the other half gallon of white paint to paint the trim, including the cute details on the 3 swinging double doors.  Dusty did some tightening and reinforcing of the door hardware so they weren't as saggy and swung better and replaced a couple pieces of missing trim on the doors, it was looking like a totally different building, already.

A few months before we found the house Dusty had gone to an auction on a Saturday morning, he usually comes home with tools or trucks from these auctions so when he showed me the lights he bought I was surprised and wondered what I was missing by spending my Saturdays at home.  We had absolutely no use for them at the time, but he got four of them for $5 so we tucked them away with our other miscellaneous building materials for "someday".  As it turned out the shop was the perfect opportunity to use the lights, with a few pieces of pipe from Lowe's we built a bracket and hung one over each door.  The effect of the lights, alone, took the shop from haunted to happy.  While at Lowe's I also bought a new locking door knob for the side door, spending a total of $36.  My trip to Lowe's combined with the $5 lights brought our entire shop face lift to a whopping $41.

Sometimes it is just a quick and cheap project that you need to breathe a second wind back into your worn out self.  With the shop finished our exterior didn't look quite as haunted and we were raring to go again on the inside, with renewed hope for the end product!