A Whole New Look For Our Colonial House

Earlier this month, we finally received our new shutters and recently just got them all up. When we first purchased our house eight years ago, the house had white shutters and a white door with brown trim, no landscaping other than junk "mulch" piled up to the top of the porch and no back deck. Even inside the house, we've done so much. The walls still had the original builders white-ish, gray paint on them. The previous owners had had the house built and lived here about 11 years (?) prior to us purchasing it. Eleven years and not once painting. I personally, just don't get that but hey, what-eva. So we are only the second owners of this lovely colonial house.

In the past eight years we have done sooo much to this house, both inside and out. I thought it would be great to share our "re-decorating", room by room. Well, since this was actually my first house, we have probably redecorated a few rooms more than once already. I love to decorate and always have tons of ideas. But in the last year, I guess you can say I've focused in more on redecorating to the style of the house (colonial) while continuing to add our own personal touches. Now that we have started doing this, I hope to show before and after pictures when ever possible. But there might be some rooms where I just never thought to get the before, so you won't get the full impact of the change, but you'll get the idea. It is not our plan to go full colonial style, just use it as a basis by which to design and decorate our house after. A touch of yester-year, if you will.

Most recently, were the shutters. It's sort of a conversation piece really (our house), because it is a bright yellow -not muted, trust me bright yellow. When we first moved here I suggested getting black shutters but my husband nixed that idea saying he didn't want a bumble bee looking house. So, I opted for a soft sage green. We cut costs by spray painting the white shutters and front door to a lovely shade of sage green.

What made our colonial house even more beautiful was the fact that it had a wrap around porch with 3/4 gazebo at the end of the side. In this first picture, we still had our summer flowers in bloom and you'll notice a very large tree at the corner of the house. This tree, although lovely and provides great privacy of the porch, really takes away from the wrap around porch.

Now that we have settled in and know what we want in our house decor, I had decided (again) we needed to go with black shutters and my husband has finally agreed. He's glad he did because he really likes how the house looks now. And we have many plans for the upcoming summer. For starters, the front door will also be painted black (this is a brand new door, as well) and we just never got to painting it before the cold weather settled in. You can also get a better glance at the porch with the tree having lost all its' leaves.

We had our roof reshingled (well, my husband did the whole job -tear off and put on!) in a brown and had purchased new outside lights in brown, all this prior to deciding on the black shutters. It sort of bugs me but it's something I'll have to live with now. Although it's not too bad.

You'll also notice between the two pictures that we have actually pulled some things from our garden near the house (mainly a small tree). This was in the beginning a full butterfly garden that I planned the layout myself. It was a great garden and one year we were visited by over six varieties of butterflies -it was so exciting!

Our pathway was originally a square "L" shaped pathway and we hated it. When we finally decided on an idea, we had had our our pathway re-done and landscaped in front, along with having some winter interest added to our yard -this was prior to both pictures. Well, when that was done, the landscaper did not know of my full butterfly garden and some of it was destroyed. It still has some elements for the butterflies but not nearly as many flowers as before. So both pictures above is what was left of the butterfly garden, the one large butterfly bush still remains but as I said, we pulled the small ornamental tree -to me it looked like a lollypop on a stick.

Come summer, our plans are also to pull out the very large tree at the corner of the porch. For us, I think it'll be a big shock in how the house looks but we really want to highlight our wrap around porch, (1) because no one else in our neighborhood or surrounding neighborhoods have anything like this and (2) it is a unique feature on the colonial style house. It almost gives it a victorian style touch.

Obviously once the big tree is pulled we'll have to come up with some landscaping to accent the porch, but not cover it up. Our house is a project we love working on and I look forward to sharing our changes with you. So tell me what you think -leave a comment.