The San Gabriel House :: the exterior

I have just about gone cukoo crazy with all these before and afters this week.  But I'm not done yet.  Here's another one for you.  

You see, while we were busy renovating the interior and backyard at the San Gabriel house, this happened.  And sadly, yes, those are our overgrown bushes and yes, that is a piece of plywood we were using as a garage door.

Remember I mentioned that we finally hired some help to do the weeding in the backyard?  Well, when they were done back there, they got busy on our pint-sized front yard.  Here's the house in its' still ghetto fabulous state, but it looks way better without all those weeds.

I can't even imagine what our neighbors thought was going on over at our place.  Here we are trying out some paint colors.  And yes; we painted the entire exterior.  BY OURSELVES.

You're probably not going to believe this, but we never did replace that plywood with a proper garage door.  Instead, we decided to let the new homeowners deal with that expense and in the meantime, we got a little crafty. My creative, superstar husband (who was still my boyfriend back then) had the brilliant idea that we should add some decorative molding to the plywood.  Again, our friend Google helped us out.  Do a search for "mid-century garages" and you'll find a ton of cool images.  This one stuck out to us and served as our inspiration.

So one afternoon, Biff did THIS.  Bam!  In my book, that man is seriously brilliant.

We painted the exterior of the house and as I mentioned in an earlier post, we also painted the aluminum window casings.  Scroll up and look at the before photo.  The black on the windows makes a huge difference.  Even though it was an enormous pain in the ass, it was cost effective and looked great.  

The San Gabriel reno taught me so much about myself.  I'm physically stronger than I ever believed and can handle more stress that I thought was humanly possible.  AND I love gardening!  Who knew?  

May I have a drum roll please?  Ta daaaaah!!  Here she is all cleaned up pretty.  I love the way the black mulch tied in with the window casings, house trim and garage molding.

I remember the day I took this photo.  The sun was just starting to go down and Biff and I had been working on the house all day.  We were so exhausted yet so excited.  Within a month, we had placed the house on the market.  It sold 6 days later.

A sweet family moved in...a husband and wife with two children and one on the way.  We've only driven by once since we moved.  We were over on that side of town and just couldn't help ourselves.  It was nice to see that they've been taking care of our little front yard.  And of course, they replaced that plywood garage door.  I imagine they've made some other upgrades inside the house too; hopefully they put in a sprinkler system in the backyard.  Watering back there was a total nightmare.  
Selling the San Gabriel house was a necessity and in a time when people were sitting on real estate for months, we know how fortunate we were to have made such a quick sale.  Moving from there broke my heart though.  Biff and I fell in love while fixing up that lil' disaster of a home; we created something amazing there and I like to say it's all that spackle and paint that is going to hold us together forever.  

Are you in love with where you live?  And if so, what is it about your home that you love so much? 

The San Gabriel House :: the backyard

Gardening is still on the brain today but instead of focusing on my new garden wall project like I should be, I'm wandering down memory lane again; this time, I'm obsessing over the dramatic before and afters of the San Gabriel house backyard.  See for yourself.  Oh...and try not to judge.

When I met Biff, the backyard looked like this.

Good Lord... Thank God we met and were friends first, because in a dating scenario, I'm not sure this type of yard is something I could've gotten past.  It's just sooooo bad, right?

Biff was digging up the back yard all by HIMSELF like a crazy person.  You can see in the second photo above, that he was making a raised 'bed'. When he wasn't working, he was digging.  Pure madness.  I finally convinced him that he needed some help and we hired a couple of young guys to weed the back yard and help with the planter.  So it went from what you see up top there...

To this.

Still awful, but much better.

All that digging worked; we had a huge planter bed that was sectioned off using railroad ties.  The idea was to have colorful greenery and plants in most of the raised bed with a small section saved for a garden.  We wanted sod for the grassy area, a clean and BLUE pool and knew that eventually we needed some sort of cover for the pool's pump and other components too.

In this photo we've just begun planting.  And you can see here that we've also painted a mossy green color on the cinder blocks surrounding the house.  We couldn't afford to replace the wall itself so this was the next best thing.  We couldn't believe how much of a difference it ultimately made.

The pool went from this scary monstrosity...


To this creepy crawly slime bucket.


Here I began to have hope though...


And when this happened, well, I almost died from happiness.  That pool was blue for miles and my heart was so full of joy I'm surprised it didn't explode right then and there.


The day the sod arrived was a good day too.

I've never been happier to wake up at 5am and work my butt off.

We worked SO hard... And it looked SO great.  We were quite proud of ourselves.

The kids were happy about it too.  Here we are jumping for joy! :)
And here's how the backyard looked when we sold the house.  Success!

Holy ground cover over-growth!  It looks like a certain "someone" was a little impatient and wanted instant gratification so that certain someone "may" have planted the ground cover a wee too close together.  Oopsy.

And before I forget, you've got to see the patio that leads out to this backyard space.  I wish I had a photo of how it looked in its' original state of disgust.  The photo below though, is how it looked shortly after I met Biff and I am telling you, a TON of progress had already been made (you can see another angle of all the yard overgrowth here too).  When he bought the house this was an enclosed patio.  Yep.  An enclosed patio with a fire pit. Say whaaaaat???


This is another great before and after. In addition to removing the roof and walls, we painted the beams black and the brick walls white.  We also continued the moss green color we used in the back yard on the cinder block walls. A pressure cleaner helped too, as did a lot of scrubbing on our hands and knees.  This porch was just off of the kitchen and den areas of the house and quickly became one of our favorite spots; we roasted s'mores with the kids and had countless dinners under the stars with friends.  And here's how the patio looked when we moved.

Divine!!  This backyard and patio makeover goes to show that absolutely anything is possible. Wait till you see what we did to the front of the house... :)