Sylvia Road Exterior

The exterior work at Sylvia Road was fairly extensive as the house was built in 1964 and moved to the site in the same year. Incredibly, almost everything was as it was in 1964!

This meant paint in extremely poor condition, overgrown gardens and all sorts of 'treasures' around the place such as old tin cans and tools.

There was a large amount of weeds, rocks and concrete underneath the deck and all of this needed clearing before we went any further. The previous owners had passed away several months before and the house had been empty, and therefore not maintained for quite some time.

We cleared out everything and not surprisingly, filled a number of rubbish skips during our time at Sylvia.

We also had no front fence for most of our time there so everyone in the neighbourhood liked to have a good look in as they went past, it was one of the things I hated the most!

After we cleared underneath the deck we used some oriental trellis to enclose the area so we could store the kids outdoor toys and gardening equipment there. It worked a treat and looked so much better. Karen was the brains behind many of these exterior ideas and we were so grateful to have her expertise and assistance!

Taff repainted the exterior in Wattyl's Off White and the roof was finished in Resene Grey Friars. The deck and stairs were also sanded and repainted in the same colour as the roof.

The garage was sanded (Taff spent several nights sanding the corrugated garage door) and repainted to match the rest of the house. We were lucky enough to be able to use the spray gun for the exterior painting so that aspect was very fast, it was the preparation of all the surfaces that took forever.

The front deck was too small to fit our large outdoor furniture set so that was placed on our sprawling front lawn, close to the kids playhouse which we added.

We decided against creating a new driveway even though it desperately needed one, mainly due to budget constraints. We were selling the house in summer so it wouldn't be boggy at that stage! lol.

Finally, I added some modern concrete planters to the front deck and the exterior was pretty much done. In addition, we did a lot of gardening work with Karen and I will be blogging about this in more detail in the coming days. It was very physical work but I have to say, I really enjoyed it!

Tomorrow I will be blogging about the changes we made in the living area. :-)