Hola! I moved into the current Maison Newton in July 2014 and retired in January 2015. I've been puttering around the front and back yards since I first moved in and slowly making the home my own - hopefully for the better from when I bought it.
This is a review of what I've done to the front of the house since I moved in to "dress her up" and make her pretty. It's always so rewarding when I'm out working in the yard and a passerby stops and complements on how pretty my house looks. Other than maintenance yard work (mowing the grass, fertilizing, weeding, trimming shrubs, trees and grass and occasional edging the lawn), the steps I took to add to my home's curb appeal were pretty basic:
1. Added annual and perennial plants to the garden beds, changed out plants that didn't do well.
2. Added planters and door mat to front door area.
3. Used a shepherd's hook to hang a bird house during spring and summer and a lantern with battery operated candle in fall and winter.
4. Added nice trellis to the front of the house.
5. Painted front door.
6. Added shutters to the large picture window.
7. New larger front porch light fixture.
8. New larger address plaque.
9. New larger mail box.
10. Lined front garden beds with concrete blocks.
11. Added new garden bed (area not shown in photo below) on south side of the driveway - it can be seen from the public sidewalk and added a lot of color and beauty to the yard, as well as replacing a lot of mud-encrusted gravel.
12. Seasonal plantings here and there, to fill in bare spots and add some color, especially late in the season.
The house was well maintained but plain out front when I bought it, and the shrubs, trees and plants were much smaller than they are now. Here's a photo of what the house looked like a few months before I bought it (early spring 2014; I bought the house at the end of May 2014):
One of the first things I did after I moved in was put up sheer curtains across the front window so people couldn't stare into the house 24/7/365! I like my privacy.
Within a few weeks I added a rug/mat to wipe shoes outside the front door and later added matching planters on either side of the door. Below is a photo taken about 2 years after I moved in. I had painted the original mail box red, added a swatch of wallpaper across the front of it to add some contrast to the red, and moved an old black metal trellis (that had been in the flower bed along the north side of my driveway) to between the windows on the left front side of the house. I also hung a decorative wreath on the front door and change it out with the seasons. What looks like a dark streak underneath the mailbox on the right side is a string of colored beads on a metal chain with a little bird on top. The old mail box had two "hooks" hanging from underneath where a rolled newspaper could be inserted, and those hooks were great for holding decorations, especially at Christmas.
I don't recall the exact timing of improvements as I made them, but I had always wanted a red front door and finally, after living in the house five years, I got around to painting the fiberglass front door a bright cherry red, in the summer of 2019. Yeah, it takes me awhile to get motivated sometimes. Below is a photo I took during the painting process.
In 2019 I also added the following (via the wonderful work of a handyman): (1) new light fixture; (2) new address plaque that is more visible and readable from the street (I covered up the old built-in address plaque with a piece of painted styrofoam, you can see it underneath the light. It always bothered me that the house number wasn't centered under the light); (3) new larger red mailbox; and (4) the decorative shutters on the picture window.
I had added the two artificial topiaries on either side of the door in 2017 (I think) and they lasted about three years before they started falling apart from sun damage. Every time I touched one some of the artificial leaves would fall off. I stored them inside in the basement during the winter, it was the sun that got to them even though they were treated to resist UV damage. That front door and everything on the little front porch takes a real beating in the summer with sun from the southwest and full west. I retired them at the end of the season in 2020. In the photo below, taken in autumn 2019, you can see I added a second set of planters (temporary only) that were filled with hardy garden mums going into the fall.
With 2020 came the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the extreme heat and humidity, I got more active around the yard and the house than ever before. Summer 2020 was when I finally lined the front garden beds and a garden bed in the backyard with small concrete retaining wall blocks I had bought from a niece-in-law a couple of years before. They'd been sitting out behind the garage ever since then - a huge stack of them.
Each block weighed 14 pounds and I lugged each one about 100 feet from behind the back of the garage in the backyard to the front yard, one by one.
The white plastic trellis replaced the black metal one to anchor the space between the two windows on the left side of the house in 2016 or 2017. It shows up much more against the colors of the house, but is stored in the garage during Wisconsin winters. The photo above is what the house looked like in summer 2020. You may notice the little bird house hanging from a shepherd's hook to the left of the front steps. In the autumn and winter that goes into storage and is replaced by a lantern with a battery operated timer candle.
And below are some photos of what the front of the house looks like now, autumn 2021.
The planters were filled with red geraniums and white petunias from May to the end of September, but as the weather got cooler the petunias started to look a bit straggly, so they have been replaced with some splashy-colored (orange, yellow, red) hardy daisy mums, and the planters have been supplemented with some artificial autumnal picks. The hardy dais mums cost 10 and there were four individual plants in the one pot I bought at my local supermarket. I call that a bargain! My Halloween/Thanksgiving ceramic pumpkins and owls are outside in front of the planters, and the candle-lit lantern is on the right at the bottom of the steps:
On the left side of the front, this year (2021) I added two red drift hardy roses in late May along with some white dianthus. On November 1, 2021, they're still blooming away! The original tall grasses that were in the spots where the rose bushes now are just didn't do very well for me, they faded away more each year. I finally took out what was left of them in 2019 and the garden bed was left pretty much bare other than for existing shrubs and a very large volunteer columbine that appeared a few years ago (that I removed this year and transplanted elsewhere). The drift roses will survive the winter, but I am crossing my fingers about the white dianthus making it through to spring 2022.
On the right side of the house, I added some seasonal color with two of the hardy daisy mums. My poor hostas took a real beating this year. We had record-breaking heat, extremely high humidity, and a drought - all at the same time. The two hostas that get the most sun were damaged with sun scorch, insect damage and perhaps some kind of infestation. But from the sidewalk, the damage isn't as noticeable and the bright daisy mums add a spark to this smaller garden bed underneath the large picture window. We haven't had a hard freeze yet, so I'm letting the leaves that are still on the hostas continue to take in the sun while they fortify their roots for the coming winter.
For the cost of the changes over the years, I don't have an exact figure in my head but I'd say maybe between $700 and $800 over seven years, not including the cost of live plant. The largest cost was for the burst of activity in 2019 when I ordered custom-made shutters for the front picture window, the new porch light, the new address plaque and hired a handyman to install them for me since I have no skills (or the correct tools and know-how) when it comes to doing work like that. All in all - I consider the cost over the years a real bargain, and I love how my house looks on the outside.
But there are always more projects to do. Am thinking of doing something with the front sidewalk, which has sunk quite a bit in front of the front porch. Also am not a fan of the concrete front porch. The flowering cherry on the left side of the house is too large to be that close to the house, even after having it trimmed back substantially in March. I would like to replace it with a tree that won't overtake the house. The garage needs rain decent rain gutters. I would like to cut down on the lawn area in both the front and back yards but do I really want to add more garden beds to what I already have???
Decisions, decisions...
