Beach House Exterior Progress

Last weekend we turned our attention to the outside of the beach house.  We are still finishing up the fence but I thought I would share our progress so far.

This is  what we started with:

We then painted the house gray and the trim white, added blue shutters, window boxes and a little striped valance.  We also beefed up the porch columns with plastic “sleeves” and some trim molding.  And we had the big tree removed because it was way too close to the house.  That brought us to here:

You can read more about this first round of updates here:

Beach house exterior color scheme

Awnings and porch valances

This past weekend, we brought in stone for the front yard.  Grass would have been nice  but it’s not easy to grow in sandy soil.  So we opted for low maintenance stone.

My son helped us out …

 To soften the lines of the house, we created some curved planting beds.  We used some edge stones from Home Depot to define the curve and keep the new  soil and mulch separated from the stone.

We chose an English laurel to anchor the left side of the house, two boxwoods to flank the entrance and one weeping cedar tree on the far right, all of which will stay green throughout the year.  We also puchased three hydrangeas for the area below and between the window boxes.

We will fill in the gaps with either some grasses or annuals …  or maybe some lavender … the smell of lavender would be wonderful when sitting on the front porch and I love the way it moves in a breeze.  Lavender needs a lot of sun, however, so I am not quite sure whether the front of the house gets the minimum  6 hours of sunlight needed for lavender to be happy.

I found some Pottery Barn outdoor pillows on clearance last week … just $15 each!   They are much thicker and larger than the ones that Home Depot and Lowes had this summer and a better price, too.

My mom painted a clay pot with some leftover turquoise exterior paint from the back door.  She so enjoyed the creative process that she painted the inside of the pot, too!  We set it on the front porch with some white asters to incorporate the turquoise pillows into the blue and white color scheme.

Well, that was our Labor Day!  More to come on making over an old fence…