Marcus Design: One Room Challenge Week 1

I'm nearly laughing at myself for being brave enough to put this project on to the internet as a Guest Participant for this round of the One Room Challenge. I'm still in new-baby exhaustion with a 6 month old whose proven to be a bit of a terrible sleeper, however we really do have this project underway already and our contractor is promising to have this done for us to enjoy for the summer. What "room" am I speaking of, you ask? Well, not a room per se. Apparently I like a challenge, we are finally completing the renovation of the front exterior of our home.

In all honestly several projects have begun and some have been completed on the outside of this wee house. But I promise if you follow along with me in real-time for the next 5 weeks, you'll see it all come together for the completed look. And maybe putting it onto the internet is the pressure we need to make sure it really happens!

The 'BEFORE' photos I'm posting here date back to Spring 2015 when we first purchased this home. We changed the front door right away, and the landscaping in Spring 2017. I'll have all the progress and the inspiration photos for you next week so be sure to come back for more!

You know what's funny? We never noticed upon purchase that the exterior lights flanking the garage are actually not aligned height wise! Apparently they line-up with the slope of the land ... does that seem weird to you? We had an electrician remove the lights just last week (yes it took us that long):

(Luckily our fantastic electrician makes night calls - thank you Chapmann Cheung!)

They were old and horribly falling apart. The home was built in 1989 and everything left original! We also had the old California-style stucco removed, next week I'll share what we replaced it with. Any guesses?

Now, one of the MAJOR portions we are completing in this 5 weeks which has NOT begun (eek), we are going to repair and repoint our bricks, it turned out that we had a significant and dangerous sagging spot above the garage. Now that we have kiddos we worry about the risk of these awful things tumbling down (sneak peek, the garage door has been painted!):

So, we are going to experiment a bit for fun here. We toyed with painting the old bricks but we aren't sure it's the look we want to go for. We are going to try a heavy mortar repair that will give the exterior a bit of an old crusty 'Charleston-charming' look. Here is one inspiration shot (taken by Marianne Simon):

We are going to install bronzed exterior lights, paint the fence black, add a black planter box for extra old-world charm, and complete the paint and landscaping. Fingers crossed we can do it on this time-line, with two little boys in tow! Hope you'll be back for more next Thursday. Make sure to head to the One Room Challenge official page for the links to all the other Guest Participants and the 20 featured designers.