THIS IS HOME.exterior
To start off my house tour I thought I would give just a little bit of background information on the home and how it came to be ours.
My husband actually bought this home after it went into foreclosure. This is a pretty uncommon situation where I live because not a lot of homes foreclose in this area of Grand Rapids. A lot of people jumped on the house right away and 4 people actually bought the house before my husband did! {This was about a year before we met} He was DETERMINED to get this house and from what I understand he did a lot of jumping over fences, peeking into windows, and even called other real estate offices and mortgage brokers pretending to be a real estate agent. All that just to get information on the house! It must have been meant to be because after 4 loss sales, the house finally went to him!
It was built in 2000 and has 4 bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths. I honestly like pretty much everything about the floor plan besides the stairs. I LOVE walk out ranch style houses, and my dream house would have everything on the same floor, with the exception of a walk-out basement and maybe a huge party loft for family hang out time {pool table, foosball, etc.}. We also live in a GREAT neighborhood where there are a lot of families with kids and people who walk or jog around here all the time! We also are really close to one of the longest paved running trails in the state! It runs for 90 miles! The entrance to it is right at the end of our neighborhood!
I am going to start by showing you the exterior of the house. The first photo is from the original listing BEFORE my husband bought it. It looks really bad! We have painted the exterior lights, painted the garage and the shutters, got a new front door, added a fence in the back yard, and done some landscaping. Honestly, we probably wont do a whole lot more to it because it is our dream to build in a few years. We will be completely replacing the exterior lights though! I would also like to extend the garden beds further out into the yard, and put in a reading garden with rocks, flowers, and a bench on the right side of the house over by the garage. We will see!
Here is the foreclosure in all its glory! YIKES!
I really have only one decent photo of the updated exterior. I took a ton of photos last summer when I had all of my flowers in bloom, but then I went on a crazy photo deleting spree to clear up some space on my computer and I did not plan on blogging about it at that time so obviously I deleted all besides one. Ugh. I promise this summer to take a lot more! Until then, here is a close up of the new front door, and you can see the shutters that we painted gray. The garage door is also this color grey. All of those bushes in the above photo are also gone, and the big tree is majorly trimmed!
So much better! the door color is Sherwin Williams "envious green". After we installed this door and chose this color, which is a super uncommon color btw, we got SO MANY compliments from people around the neighborhood. We would go on walks and I think 12 people told us they liked our new front door. It cracked us up because we did not think anyone would ever notice that we got a new door. But everyone loved this color, and another person actually changed their front door to match ours! I still love it, and it works for every season! What do YOU think? Do you like these small changes?
That is pretty much it for this post! I really felt obligated to start with the exterior. I know it's boring! the inside is so much better, I promise!
Until next time!