We had a vision for this home, which was the French Quarter in New Orleans......and our favorite Mexican Restaurants. Those two styles are pretty similar, actually, because the French Quarter in New Orleans was built by the Spanish. When the French Creoles were in charge in the area they built a French Quarter. However, it all burned. Just as the Spaniards conquered it, or bought it, or acquired it somehow, and built it in their style. Shortly thereafter, it reverted back to French control.
So the famous French Quarter is actually stylistically Spanish. And so are Mexican restaurants.
The front needed only to have bushes moved and cacti planted. After we moved bushes we found that a lot of touch-up painting was needed. We like the paint color--very southwest with white stucco and red tile roof.
Along the front walk there were bushes that had been allowed to grow. We had those removed and planted elsewhere. When we did that, though, we found that when the house was repainted (many years ago), nobody had painted behind the bushes. So the old color was there. Whoever did the painting didn't coordinate it with the Facilities office, as they were required to do, so the Facilities office did not know the color that was used for the repainting. This meant several trips to the paint store to match it as well as we could. We think it turned out well.
The back patio had two large sections that were in gravel, for reasons we don't understand. We had concrete poured there. The next project will be to install colorful pavers.
Our builder put frames around the back windows, making it look much cleaner:
A
tree was planted right outside the dining room slider. That area of
the patio was still in rock, if you can believe that. And the slider,
of course useless, was nailed shut. We had the tree removed, the slider
replaced, and concrete put where the rock was.
The front door had a cheap, flimsy storm door. We replaced it with a strong security door:
New slider for the living room, to replace the old aluminum, boring one that was so heavy that it needed both of us to open:
One
of the many selling points for this house was that the entire back of
the house was built with doors looking out onto the trees and grass of
the golf course.
However,
the sliders and doors were ancient and not functional. We replaced the
cheap storm doors on the back with high quality security doors:
Fluorescent lights in the kitchen:
We did a lot of work on the back deck--cleaning things up basically. One thing we did was to repaint the fleur-de-lis (like) parts of the patio fence that had been (ugh, one of my pet peeves) painted over.
When the new doors were installed a lot of the stucco beneath them had to be ripped off. We replaced the stucco and painted it:
And we touched up around the stucco patio wall:
These are the small imperfections that people only notice when it's in their own home (I mean, who goes looking for those things when you are visiting others?). Small, but cumulatively they make a big difference.
Some other photos of the home after remodeling:
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