DIY kinda girl: Painting the town RED

So we've spent a great deal of time fixing up our house. Mostly on the inside. We (well, my husband) did do a tremendous amount of work on the front yard, but...the yard is still DEFINITELY not where we want it to be. Nonetheless, we have some other curb appeal projects just waiting for us to get to them. Finally, I decided to JUST DO one of them.

I painted our front door. Red. (insert big toothy smile here.) I love red. It makes me happy.

I also installed a new door handle/lock set (ALL BY MYSELF, as those of you who follow me on Facebook already know), which I think looks pretty sharp. That was kinda an accident. We were going to wait until next spring to replace the door hardware, along with acquiring a rather expensive door knocker and doorbell I have my eye on. And the lighting. But the tape leaked, so I got red paint on the old lock and knob (shoulda just taken them off), and when I tried using nail polish remover to get it off (bad idea)...I pretty much ruined 'em. Well, they didn't look much worse than they already did, but still....not something I wanted to put on my beautiful red door. So I headed off to Lowe's and found an awesome set that regularly was $124...but on clearance for $31. Yes, over 90 bucks off. AWESOME.

Anyway, thought I'd show you some photos.

This is our house when it was first put up for sale. Notice the mounds of mulch covered dirt, the tree directly in front of our front door, lots of shrubs and the very odd patch in the middle of our lawn (strawberries, as it turns out). Unfortunately, this is not what it looked like by the time we bought it in February. It had been empty since August, so underneath all the snow was a very overgrown yard. My husband dug out the little tree, all the shrubs (except those by the tree in the left corner of the photo, they hide a large green electrical box we didn't even know was in our yard until we closed on our house), flattened the mounds as much as possible, dug out the strawberry patch, and seeded the whole she-bang.

So here is what it looked like a few days ago. Much better for our purposes (the grass is still coming in though). However, my big tree is blocking the view of the front door. And the front door is dingy and scuffed. And plain white.

And this is what it looks like now!!! Painted red, new hardware, and I got on a ladder with a saw and pruned some branches myself. Don't know the first thing about pruning trees, and didn't bother Googling it (the source of all knowledge) so hopefully I didn't do any permanent damage!