Rejuvenation Projects Blog

To start, a refresher on the exterior of my home on the date of purchase:

The first official picture of our house

Check out the hot awnings, the trim around the garage (yes, that’s pressure treated wood), the stairs going up to the front door.  What’s hard to truly appreciate from the picture is just how ugly the front stairs/door combo really were.  That said, we had decided to let it slide for a while – that is until I noticed that the boards used to build the stairs were “loose”.  So in the middle of our office project, I was standing outside getting some air and I decided to lift one up and see what was underneath.

A closer look at the stairs in question

My dad had always been a fan of this plastic wood/composit stuff.  I don’t know, for some reason it made me uneasy.  Upon pulling up the stair, I realized that there were concrete stairs underneath and that they were falling apart.  Surprise, surprise – and of course, this was the exact moment that I discovered one of my neighbors was a contractor (convenient, I know!).  He had just pulled up from a day of work and I could hear him having a good chuckle at my dilemma from his driveway.  At this point, my hub had arrived and wanted to “know more” about the cracking concrete stairs, stating that he thought it could be the reason our cold storage had sprung a leak during spring.  Long story short (seriously, it was way longer), we quickly realized that we had to rip the stairs out, seal and repair our cold room, and put something back in to gain entrance to our house.

Our "fixed" concrete stairs

Once we got all of the plastic stuff off, we quickly discovered that the broken concrete stairs were actually the second set.  Notice the missing awning, new glass insert in the front door, the missing bushes – ah, gotta love the million little projects along the way.

One set on top of the other

We demoed it.

No more stairs! Or ceiling in our cold storage!

It made such a mess, wow.  Thankfully, our neighbor Dan (of Kehler Renos, Ottawa) was helping us out… well, really – he directed and we obliged.

Cold room repaired, framed in and ready...

Ready for what?  Well, since we had to rebuild the front steps – I decided to incorporate a front deck into the design.

My new front deck!

Is it a porch?  In my head, a porch is covered.  I had a million pictures of the during now I have no idea where they are.  Ah!  That’s what happens when you do a project in six days (my hub and the neighbor did it after work over two weekends, madness!).  We’re going to paint it out next year and move the path – but for now, it looks like this:

Our updated curb appeal

Soon we will be painting out the trim and getting new eaves, the rest of the awnings will be down and we will need to pick new lights.  So far, it’s very popular in the neighborhood – front sitting areas (large ones at least) aren’t very common in our area.  Any suggestions on lighting??