House Tour - Before and After: Exterior and front porch

One of my goals for this blog is to document the crazy adventure we have been on for the past almost 2 years now of completely remodeling our house. Eventually, I would like to write a post going through each of the before and after's of all the rooms in the house. So, this is the first of those posts. I'll call it the House Tour - Before and After. 

So, naturally we should start with the first thing you would see when you come to our house...the exterior and front porch. I'm not sure that this can technically be called an "after" because we still have a lot we want to do but this is the current state...and it's a whole lot better than it was! 

So here we go! This is what we inherited when we bought the house in February 2011...

Yeah, that even makes me a little scared looking at it...

Before we moved in after our wedding in March, Marcos and his parents did some general clean-up and bush-whacking which left it looking like this.

Muuuuuuuuch better but still not exactly a welcoming home-y sight. About a year and a half in we had removed the two dead trees, had a lawn care service help us out with the nasty dead grass, and tried our hand at planting our first flower bed, along with reframing the front windows so that it looked like this (notice the plywood walls around the windows).

And then in June 2012 we did the siding with TONS of help from family and friends who we are sooooooo grateful for! At that time we also removed the rotten beams from over the front entryway.

We also recently refinished the front door which you can read about here.  So about two years and lots of blood, sweat, and tears later it looks like this...

oh yeah, and we added a little monkey during that time too if you didn't notice from the photo bomb.

We still have a lot we want to do with the front porch and flower beds, but at least its not like walking into a jungle to get in the front door. 

Gotta love a great before and after!