House #1: Rehabbed!

We finally finished The Corn House rehab today! While the GC finished a couple days ago, we’ve spent the last couple days touching up, staging, landscaping, and doing some repainting of the front deck…

When our agent stopped by to view the property the other day, she noted that the vinyl siding (which can’t easily be painted) appeared to be a bit too blue. While I figured that it was just an artifact of the house we had to live with, my wife was more optimistic. She suggested that by painting the front door and repainting the front porch (something other than the bright white we had originally painted it), we could make the exterior appear less blue. This made sense until she proposed how we would do it — we’d paint the front door a deep blue and paint the front porch a blue-gray. Adding more blue didn’t really seem like the best way to detract from the blue color, but she insisted that it would work; and in the end (of course), she was correct. The new colors are fantastic, and while I’m not happy about the fact that we spent two days painting it ourselves, I’m very happy with the results.

Here’s a link to the BEFORE pictures and here’s what the exterior front of the house looks like now:

We also spent the past two days working with our landscapers to get this large lot properly landscaped. The front of the house has lots of trees, bushes, and “islands” of foliage, and we wanted to highlight those assets. The backyard used to have a 40′ x 40′ deck with in-ground pool, so it took several hours on a Bobcat to remove the final remnants of the deck (about 40 posts concreted 2′ beneath the surface), level the yard, re-grade it, and put in grass-seed and pine-straw. We also had lots of bamboo growing nearly 20′ in height, so that had to be cut down, roots removed, and disposed of. All-in-all, landscaping took six guys about 12 hours, but the results are fantastic.

Here are some shots of the landscaping after completion of the work:

Lastly, I’ve updated all of the AFTER photos for The Corn House…enjoy!

I’m looking forward to getting this house on the market tomorrow…