Exterior

You know your house looks bad when a neighbor (and I don't mean your next door neighbor, I mean like a guy who lives down the street) stops by and tells your husband that he has 5 gallons of paint leftover from his house (it's flat, he ending up using semi gloss on his house) that you can have.
That kicked off "weekend work on exterior of the house." The exterior has many issues and like so many of the renovations, everything is inextricably linked. You need a new driveway, well first you need to get the roof done, so you don't have a dumpster on your new driveway. You want a new roof, well first you need to order one more skylight and also paint the dormers. Because if you get paint on the roof shingles, you will apparently NEVER get it off. But before you can paint, you actually need to repair/replace the rotting wood and prime. My husband got started on the last task this weekend. Scraping, sanding, and using some wood restorative on Dormer #1! Only 2 more to go!
He also wire brushed one of the old metal support columns for the porch and did a test of high gloss black paint. It looks much better! Hopefully the next 5 will follow shortly.
As he noted, the last paint job was inspired by zero creativity. Everything was painted dusty blue. Dormers, Trim, Metal Columns, Door, Shutters. Here's a picture from Christmas. At this point we had replaced the door with our mahogany door from the old house.

The plan: keep the brick as is. Paint the shutters flat black, paint the metal columns, gloss black, paint the dormers dark gray, paint the trim cream, paint an accent trim piece at the top of each window deep red.
We also got a new bid for the driveway. As far as I'm concerned it's the most boring way to spend thousands of dollars, but we have to do it. The approach to our house (over a culvert) is really narrow and the driveway has about 2039482930482 cracks and looks awful. We are going to replace most of the concrete with crushed limestone to improve drainage and generally decrease the amount of concrete in this world.
The most exciting part of the exterior renovations (well painting is exciting) is the landscaping. I'm accepting all offers of (especially shade tolerant) plants! I still need to figure out how much sunlight will get through once spring/summer hit and all the leaves grow back in the trees. As the grass doesn't seem to want to grow near the house, we're planning on doing some large plant beds. This should be an improvement on the NOTHING that is there now. My mother in law gave us those netting lights for Christmas and noted we just had to throw them over the bushes. I said "We have no bushes." So needless to say, those boxes didn't get opened this year. This weekend I focused on busting up a large circular planting bed that you can't see in the photo. It was so close to the driveway that at least once I opened my car door and hit brick, a 17,000 square foot yard and someone has to build the ONE raised plant bed RIGHT next to the driveway? Anyway it was kind of cool, but it had to go to make way for a wider driveway. I got to pick-ax my way through plant roots. Fun stuff! I'll take some progress pictures and post soon!