Ashland Renovation....Exterior

We bought our 1935 cottage in the Houston Heights back in Jan '09. Then the transformation began taking a total of 4 months with lots of late nights and every weekend devoted to demo, framing, trim work, tile, and so on. We'll start from the beginning with some before and after pics and move our way through the house. Enjoy!!

Before- exterior

The exterior needed some major waking up! We had the limestone circular drive removed (you can see the car parked on it in the before pic) to make way for some new St. Augustine grass and new concrete sidewalks and a driveway. We removed all the overgrown shrubs to start from scratch for new flower beds.

The exterior was freshly painted (Sherwin Williams- Smoky Blue) and a new craftsman style front door and new porch were built/installed by Chris. Then we added some black star gravel in front of the new sidewalks to create additional parking for visitors to the house (a common thing done here in the Heights). Finally we built (in two weekends) the wooden fence surrounding our lot and since we are a corner lot it was a lot of wooden pickets!!!! But it was all worth it to see the final product.

After- exterior