Connor and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary on Monday, and we've been admiring all of our accomplishments around the house. The majority of our interior renovations have just been paint, fixtures, and furniture, but when it came to the exterior of our house we needed some contracted help. The first priority was a new roof. When we had the house inspected for closing a year ago, we had some concerns about the old roof. There was some discoloring and missing shingles, but since it wasn't leaking the owners weren't required to replace it. We've been patiently waiting for a little more storm damage to accrue, and by March we called several roofing companies to come out and estimate the replacement costs. After meeting with Freedom Roofing they suggested we call our insurance to file a claim. We were surprised to learn that Safeco would pay for the roof replacement on the main house and garage, as well as the new wood to nail the shingles to! We are so, so thankful for our roofers taking the time to meet with the insurance inspector and working so diligently to remove not one, but two layers of shingles and the original cedar shakes from 1926. I initially wanted a metal roof, but since we made an insurance claim we had to replace the roof with the same surface. We were, however, able to upgrade the composite shingles to architectural shingles and pay the difference out of pocket. Since my metal roof dreams were squashed, I decided to use white shingles to get a similar look. Connor took a tiny bit of convincing, but he trusts my fixer upper obsession and my final vision for our bungalow. As it turns out "Arctic White" architectural shingles are hard to come by in South Carolina, so we had to wait a week for a lot to be shipped to us. I really love how the roof turned out, and we've already noticed a difference in our power bill since switching to an energy efficient color. You'll also notice that we removed an addition off of our garage to open up our backyard.
A few weeks later we removed the iron rails and aluminum awning from the front porch. We left the columns in tact so we could use them as a base for the new cedar columns. After searching Pinterest, I found a tutorial for wrapping old columns to create an updated look. You can read about it here. We custom ordered our 12" cedar boards from 84 Lumber, and it only took a couple hours to assemble them. I rolled on the stain and water sealer the next day to finish the look. I am so in love with them! They turned out even better than I expected, and it was so easy to do since we were just wrapping the existing columns.
Finally, it was time to work on the siding. We laid out our options, and figured we could either paint the aluminum, restore the original wood siding underneath the aluminum, or replace it with vinyl or hardie board. After some investigating, we decided the most economical option was to paint the aluminum. I hired A1 Painting to pressure wash the house and garage, and paint the house. They use Sherwin WIlliams paints, so I picked the color Indigo Batik and fell in love with our bungalow all over again.