Renovations by Rookies

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I’ve said rookie a lot so far on my website. I basically want everyone to know that we have not arrived, and we make some hilarious mistakes as we try our hand at living with more land than we’ve ever cared for in a home that was built right before the Great Depression. Can you believe that? Good old 1928.

We (or maybe it was mostly me) had always wondered what it would be like to renovate a home. A fun fact about us is that we were on House Hunters on HGTV when we were buying a home in Beaverton, OR. That is another tale for another day, but at that point in our lives and specifically on the show, we were more so looking for newer builds that didn’t require much “fixing up.” I knew that I would love the creative process of renovation, but I also knew that we, two full-time workers, were not in a place to dedicate that kind of time to a home.

Well, fast-forward a few years and Josh found this little 1928 farmhouse in Vancouver, WA. Josh works in nearby Camas, WA, and had been trying to get me to agree to moving our family across the Oregon border for quite some time. Never, I thought. I love Portland too much…our community and church is in Beaverton, I work in Beaverton. But I thought I’d throw him a bone to get this specific home search out of his system.

Well, it’s comical how quickly that bone came around boomerang-style and punched me in the face as we pulled up to this peaceful little house on 3 and a half acres of property with a barn, a pond, a garden and a chicken coop. The sunset was illuminating everything gloriously on a clear winter day, and the birds were delightfully chirping. Dang it, I conceded. We ran around like, well… chickens, unable to soak it in fast enough.

Dang it was right. As soon as I rolled open those pretty barn doors and saw that it had, in fact, been partially rebuilt specifically for hosting gatherings with hanging lights and a rugged little built-in bar, I heard the Holy Spirit whisper humorously, “this part is for you to dream a little more.” Then we walked over to the garden and I felt him say, “I think you’ll really like this part.” And then we crossed a little creek into a field and I realized that maybe some open space was what I’d been longing for.

That night, we wrote the mushiest letter with a picture of our family and sent in our offer as quickly as we could. “Are we really offering on a Mini Farm?" What are we doing?!” We said back and forth to each other.

They accepted.

I can’t quite say that buyer’s remorse came into play, because we were just amazed that this kind of land was even in our price range (unlike anything we would ever find in or around Portland metro). We felt we had bought well. But in our hype of loving the land and everything that accompanied it, there were many gritty details of the house itself that we had missed in the frenzy of our home tour.

No central AC or heating. Outdated electrical everything (knob-and-tube wiring, if we’re being specific). Lighting that made me want to cringe (and if you know me, then you know that I’m confident the good Lord will have warm lighting and dimmer switches everywhere in my eternal dwelling). Cracks in the walls. Holes in ceilings. Poorly executed previous attempts at some handy work. The weirdest use of bathroom space you’ve ever seen. Nasty carpet with who-knows-what growing in the weave.

A month later—a week before Oliver’s 1st birthday and one day after our new carpet was laid in the bedrooms—we moved in. It was mid-January, it was on the verge of snowing, and we realized that a couple of our cadet wall heaters weren’t working. Thankfully though, Oliver’s room was nice and toasty. We contacted a contractor as quickly as we could to get a few projects underway.

“Your whole front porch is dry rot, “ he said as he approached our home. “It’s about to collapse. This needs to be fixed immediately.”

Well, once you rebuild a front porch and add fresh stonework and new cedar beams, you might as well add a new front door. Of course that front door will contrast the tired paint, so you might as well paint the house. And the barn. Oh, and the garden shed. And then you might as well learn how to build new shutters and get the roof cleaned. And what’s a new home exterior without some updated light fixtures and new plants? The mouse ate the cookie and the moose ate the muffin, and the cycle continued.

We certainly hadn’t intended to start using our renovation budget on the exterior of our home—especially since everyone advised us to start with the interior first—but we do not regret it! Even though there was much work to be done inside, we absolutely loved pulling up to our house every day and seeing our vision that had come to life. All the neighbors on our kind, dead-end street were delighted that we had taken care to update our house and each outbuilding.

There are more interior projects that we have taken on since renovating the exterior of our home, but for now, enjoy the before and after pictures (as well as a few more stories) through the renovation process of our home’s exterior!

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WELCOME HOME

Here is how she looked when we bought her! Great bones and a welcoming feel...just needed some love. Desperate to have something fresh, I threw one of our faux fig trees on the porch to make it look alive.

SO FRESH AND SO CLEAN...CLEAN

This is after we finished the exterior! (iPhone photo). Basically, nothing went untouched except the siding and windows. Our original wood siding will need replacing at some point in the slightly near future, but that was not in the budget for this round. This house is quaint and simple, and becoming more and more like home by the day! You can see the list of all our vendors + finishes below.

Paint Color: Benjamin Moore Simply White. This color was so pleasing, and there were no surprise undertones once in any shade of natural light. It’s bright, clean, and soft all at the same time.

Stone: Eldorado Stone, color “Nantucket”

Porch Lights: Birch Lane (there are 2 sizes…we used the 14 inch ones on the front porch and the 11 inch ones on the back porch and garage).

New Landscape Plants: Home Depot

Beam Design: 6x6 posts wrapped in cedar wood by our contractor. The stain was a custom mix of a clear Sherwin Williams stain and a little bit of black to create our own desired richness. We just kept adding in very small amounts of black and testing it on scrap wood until we got a color that matched our front door.

Shutters: Josh and I made these (more pics below!) using cedar wood and the same stain as the beams. More details on those in the images below.

LOVE IS AN OPEN DOOR

The first thing we found was the front door through a company on Craigslist. The original powder blue door was a piece of history we just couldn’t wait to switch out—and it made all the difference! Plus, it’s a modern dutch door, so the top opens without the bottom (great for a highly energetic Goldendoodle upon visitors at the front door). We also got the roof cleaned as one of the first steps so that gross debris didn't get all over the house after we painted.

BAD NEWS FIRST

This was pretty soon after we’d learned that our front porch was all dry rot—the wood was a mess and the stone facade could be peeled off with your pinky finger. Of course it snowed to make the job for our contractor easier. That pile under the right window made me cringe for weeks! You can see here in this picture that the stairs originally cut into the rectangular porch shape. We ended up bringing the stairs out so that we could have a larger, covered front porch.

FRANKENSTEIN GUTTERS

Here she is with a cleaned roof, a fresh coat(s) of Benjamin Moore “Simply White” paint, a new porch and…Frankenstein gutters sticking out like Q-tips. This was the temporary way our gutters were set to keep water away from the immediate base of the home. In following images, we ended up using rain chains from Amazon.

THE BEST DAY

The best day was when we went to Home Depot, picked out some new landscape plants and got a few units of fresh cedar wood chips delivered. Some of our plant selections haven’t done too well where we placed them, so we’ll be making some changes this spring for sure. But a mowed lawn and a fresh coat of bark really made the rest of the house feel like she belonged right where she was.

BLACK & WHITE

Eventually, we will want to get some new black french doors onto our back deck that don’t have so many dents and damages. After the painters finished painting everything, I looked at the back of the house and saw I hadn’t given them any direction on these doors! “Sorry…can you paint them black?” I asked at the last minute.

The Birch Lane lights here are the 11 inch ones while the front porch were 14 inch.

EVENING GLOW

One of the final things we did last summer was buy some landscape lighting. It really made the new stone and wood work pop at night! But I’m going to go ahead and say right now that, while they looked beautiful for awhile, we are having a little trouble getting them to work now. Therefore…I won’t yet be linking any recommended lights to try quite yet!

THE MAKING OF THE SHUTTERS

Shockingly, adding shutters was one of the biggest impacts we could have made, especially since we went white-on-white with the house color and trim color. Originally, we saw a post that showed using three 6x1 pieces of wood for the width of each shutter. But 18 inches wide for one single shutter seemed too big for our house and our windows. We ended up using two 8x1 cedar planks for each shutter and added the 2.5 inch trim. We also originally had trouble deciding how tall to make the shutters, but we landed on making it as tall as the glass of the window itself, not as tall as the actual trim work.

We literally made shutters for 5 windows in one Saturday afternoon and evening—from the treck to Home Depot to the staining! We let them dry fully overnight, and then got them up on the house the next day. Josh hates painting and staining of any kind, so I usually spare him and own that part of the process.

A QUICK GLANCE AT THE GARDEN SHED AND THE BARN

There are many more details to share about the garden and the barn, but this is simply to show how painting and staining these outhouses made a big difference on each individual space and the overall property! We used the same Simply White paint, and actually only used the clear coat on the barn and garden shed doors because I wanted them to look as natural as possible while protecting them from weather. We rehung lights in and around the barn and completely rearranged all of the raised garden beds to be more visually appealing and to create space for an outdoor dining space.