Curb appeal is hard.

Especially when your home came with zero of it.

IMG_6495

I admit that we made it worse  – the trash can, ladder and old carpet were totally our mess. But these metal porch covers were not so hot by themselves to begin with!

We have nothing against porch awnings. In fact, they are popular in Poland with stone houses, especially the retractable ones. But ours is old, rusty, and…red.

IMG_6509

But we cannot remove it yet, because our front porch has sunk and is currently sloping TOWARDS the house. So removing the porch cover will cause rain water to flow to the foundation.

IMG_6059

We do want to open up the porch as much as we can. So one afternoon, after the old carpet went away, Slav took his grinder to the horizontal railing.

IMG_6647

Much more open without it!

Then, inevitably, our eyes landed on other imperfections – the horribly rusted window well cover, the ugly house numbers, the stadium-style flood light, and do not get me started on that black storm door on top of white front door thing…

02

It amazes me that none of the stuff hung here is straight – in a very negative way.

Since we have started, we might as well finish it. We started tackling other things:

1. Getting rid of the black mail collector

We have a legit mailbox next to the curb, so this mail collector is just getting filled with ads and religious flyers. It was off right away.

2. Taking the rotten house number off

We might put up something modern once our front fence after it is built, but for now, stick-on numbers on the mailbox satisfies the building code.

The dirty and rotten house number plate

IMG_6801

3. Taking down down the storm door

We need a storm door for Colorado winter. But for now, we can get away from not having one while we search for a storm door we both like.

4. Porch lighting!

During a trip to habitat for humanity, we found two porch lighting for merely 8 bucks each.

01

I disassembled them to for a good scrubbing. With new LED light bulbs, they looked almost new!

04

We went from this:

03

to this:

IMG_7221

The other light we bought replaced the old brass fixture on top of the basement stairs. It has a motion sensor on it, so we no longer need to turn the stair light on and off. It made me so happy to see yellow lights down and black ones up!

05

And our front porch now looks like this:

IMG_7222

I think we have 5% of the curb appeal now. What do you think? Will you give me a more generous score?