Giving the Exterior a Little Color

I wanted to paint the front door and garage doors of our home a while ago but couldn't decide on a color.  I would normally go to red (because I always go to red) but the tan brick and cream / light yellow siding colors don't go with red.  So I ended up choosing a grey-ish blue.  I think it works well with the existing colors on the house; it brings out some of the darker tones in the bricks.

This is a pretty simple project, but made a big impact.

I also really want to get shutters up on the top level windows to tie it all together, but for now, the doors have all been painted.

Before:

I painted the door in one afternoon, and we painted the garage doors on a Saturday morning.  We put a coat of grey tinted primer on and then 2 coats of the paint.  Painting the garage doors surprisingly didn't take very long since we used a paint gun.  The front door actually took longer because I rolled it on with a small paint roller and used a brush in the small places.

Here's the after:

 

... And as a bonus, you can see from the before and after pictures, our road in front of our house we fixed!  It wasn't fun during the construction but it is soo nice now!

Can't wait to get some blue shutters put up!

Wood Flooring- Light to Dark

Back in April we finally put new flooring in downstairs! (Something I've been wanting to do since we moved in)
The whole project (400 sq. ft.) took about 5 days total, over the space of about 2 weeks and we had lots of help.

We looked all over the place for flooring and after going to all of the local flooring places, and didn't really find anything we liked, or it was way too expensive.  So I ordered probably 20 different samples from online places.  We narrowed it down to one- It was hand scraped and java color.  It is engineered wood and we went with that option mostly because of budget but I love the way it turned out!

AFTER

BEFORE

WAYYYY BEFORE.... BEFORE THE KITCHEN CABINETS WERE PAINTED

BEFORE

We ripped out all of the old flooring- that part of the job went quick.  It took my husband and brother about an hour to clear it all out. We also took all of the trim off because the new flooring was a little taller than the old flooring. 

We made a HUGE mess!

After the old flooring was removed, we put down some heavy black plastic to protect the new flooring.

After the plastic was put down the real work began -- as you can see from the pictures, there was a lot of people working on each part to get each piece locked in tight. All of the small spaces (especially closets) were extra hard because each piece had to be cut down to the right size, but still have the ability to lock in together.  It was basically like putting a huge difficult puzzle together :)

After we got all the flooring on, we put all of the floor boards back on and admired the work all the boys did.  It turned out great!

Here's the after pics: