Renovating with the Richesons: The Power of Paint and Plants

Why hello, it’s been a while. I have been slowly but surely making my way around the rooms in the house, picking new wall colors and trying to use up leftover colors where I can. I am happy to say every room, but one has a new coat of paint. My next step may be trim depending on how ambitious I get.

But today we aren’t going to talk about the interior of the house, rather the exterior. We lived with it as is for a few months, dead grass and all, but it was really ugly to come home to every day. The inside was finally starting to reflect our taste and the outside was still stuck in the 70’s. Back in September my parents purchase a landscaping Groupon, but we put off using it until we knew exactly what to tackle outside first.
In February we got in touch with the landscaper and he said it would be 2-3 weeks for him to draw up a plan. Perfect, we could use those 2-3 weeks ripping out the old landscaping and getting someone out here to paint. As much as I love painting I wasn’t quite up for doing the entire exterior by myself. Dadlord paid for the exterior painting and I picked the colors. I got a few samples and asked everyone I knew what there preference was. No one picked my favorite so of course that’s the one I chose. I really didn’t want the house to be too dark so I went with my lightest option which was Sherwin Williams Mindful Gray, the perfect light grey with a hint of beige.

After a few delays the old landscaping was long gone, the exterior was painted and our design was ready. We wanted to go with drought tolerant Florida friendly plants. Once established they will need little water. Since we don’t have a sprinkler system this was ideal. We also wanted large beds to reduce the amount of grass in the yard.

We had a perfect, modern design that was low maintenance but still had beautiful color. The landscapers dropped all the plants off and placed them where we needed to plant them. The rest was up to us. It only took about 4 hours to plant and mulch. That was the easiest part.
Doing a lot of the work ourselves really helped with the price.

Landscaping job if the crew had done all the work = $1600
Landscaping job with us doing the work =$600.

Big bucks saved their by planting ourselves.

The before, grabbed from Google because I only have a partial before. It was so much more overgrown than this plus my dad had planted some lovely fountain grass, read: hay, up by the front door since this picture.