Finishing Touches

Before putting the house on the market we wanted to add a couple finishing elements to help with the cuteness factor and practicality of the exterior. We had a pretty sad gray metal mailbox/post next to the street which was way too low to the ground and stylistically blah. We decided to replace it with a crisp, white, wooden mailbox post with a black box and a place to display our house numbers.

We bought a standard wood post from Lowe's and decided to tweak it a little. We removed the post support thing (I'm sure that's the correct term), and replaced it with two shelf brackets that were left in our house when we bought it. We painted the whole thing white and felt like it was a pretty easy way to add a little pop to our yard. Sadly, a couple days after we finished it, someone decided to come through our neighborhood and vandalize a few mailboxes in the middle of the night. Of course ours was one of the chosen few and we found it completely snapped in half the next morning. Luckily, Dave was able to screw the two pieces back together and with a little sanding, wood filler, and fresh paint, you really couldn't tell the difference.

The other area that needed to be addressed was the back porch. We had replaced the back door but there was no overhang over the doorway to prevent the wood from rotting or provide any shelter from rain.We debated whether we should build a roof-like structure or buy an awning. We decided to look into awnings but found custom awnings to be too expensive. After doing some research online we found EasyAwn and decided to order from them. Dave was able to assemble and attach the awning in a few hours and we were really pleased with how it looked for a last minute fix.