As crazy as this sounds, I was originally drawn to our house from the curb while house hunting in the neighborhood . Even though the house was REALLY ugly, the lot that it’s on is pretty amazing. Our house sits on half an acre and the bulk of it is in the front yard. The large front yard combined with several mature trees, sums up the things that gave the home curb appeal back when we bought it. From the get-go, our remodeling plan was to primarily focus on beautifying the interior of the home before we moved to the exterior. Though I like the way that we chose to go about the remodel, I didn’t like that our nice house looked so not nice from the street.
Here is a reminder of what our house looked like when we bought it in July of 2014.
Can you believe what a hot mess this place was?! It needed a new roof, new paint, new windows, a new driveway, a landscaping makeover and a new front door. As Conleigh would say, “That’s a LOT of things!”.
The first exterior task that we tackled was the landscaping. We severely underestimated how long it would take to completely remove the Ivy from the front bed. Trent worked on it here and there for months before the Ivy was finally dead and the bed was leveled properly and ready for planting. Originally, we thought we would just hit it with the Weed Wacker and it would be a thing of the past. HA!
When that didn’t work, we thought we would bake it with $60.00 worth of black plastic. Fail AGAIN! 
Finally, Trent decided to plow it with the lawn mower which was the ticket. Third time’s a charm!
After the Ivy was gone, there was LOTS of digging and dirt spreading to be done. Then finally it was time to plant!
Even though the house looked much better with the new landscaping, it was still ugly.
Last summer (RIGHT before Blynn was born) we (as in Me, Trent and his mom) painted the house.
The house looked much better after the paint job, but still ugly.
Last November Trent installed new windows throughout the entire house. Since we were on a budget, we installed inexpensive double pane windows along the back and side of the house, but upgraded the 3 front windows to have faux wood dividers. The white dividers on the front windows actually have dimension, and to the untrained eye, look like expensive wood casement windows at a fraction of the cost.
I really did start to think our house was pretty after the new windows, but I couldn’t seem to see past that ugly roof and driveway!
Finally, after years (yes, we have now been here for years) of waiting, we got a new roof! For the cherry on top, Trent re-sealed our driveway and I painted the front door. Voila! 
Doesn’t it look pretty cute?!? I finally feel like the outside matches the inside!
Though we have done alllllll the renovations to this house other than the interior paint, we did have a roofing company install our roof. Lucky for us, there was enough wind damage to our existing shingles that our insurance company approved us for a new roof. That meant that we only had to pay our deductible for this beauty! I was SO relieved when the inspector approved a re-roof because Trent was dead set on adding roofing to his list of trades… I know he is a handy guy, but roofing in Texas in August is no joke. Though we were almost talked out of it due to alleged energy increases, we decided to go with a black roof. Our roofer uses Tamko shingles, so we decided on their Black Walnut color. I liked that it was a mix of black and brown which seemed to give the roof more dimension than its solid black counterpart.
On the décor side of things, we swapped out our old patio furniture for these rockers, added an outdoor rug to make the space feel more cozy, put a new coat of paint on our pots, and Trent built a custom cedar planter box (to hide the nonfunctional intercom) and a matching address sign. It has been a long road to get here, but we are finally so smitten with our once ugly house!
Project Ugly House 