exterior illumination!

A few things you may not know about me:
1) I'm fickle. Exhibit A.
2) I need to be inspired before embarking on a project but once I am, there's no stopping me. Exhibit B.
3) For as long as I've lived in my house I haven't truly figured out what to do with the exterior Exhibit C to give it a more cottage quality.

UNTIL NOW!

2009

After years of seeking advice on my blog and offline, declaring color choices and then reconsidering, it finally all came together the other day after seeing a white door on a similarly colored house. I decided to just go for it and paint the front door white. {What's the worst that could happen, right? Right!}

Unplanned Reflecto-Selfy

'Twas a bit of a hack job because in theory this old door will be replaced at some point and so all I did was clean the door well with 90-something-percent rubbing alcohol; no scraping (tsk), no sanding (tsk), just two good coats of paint. In another cost-saving measure, I spray-painted the brassy mail slot shiny silver rather than spend $40 on a new one.

Then came more ideas! I found outdoor lighting fixtures and finally have shutters in mind.

Note that steps have been painted with lattice added. Hydrangeas have replaced wonky shrubs where illustrated.

I went through my cottage + curb board on Pinterest and realized that I needed to create a collage to sort my thoughts and so I assembled a few at Picmonkey.com. The collages illustrate things that exist such as the flowering plants (thank you, previous owners), things on my to-do list (order shutters, install lights), and wish list items (picket fence with roses, stone path).

Click image to enlarge

The process of creating these collages is very helpful to me in gathering and sorting things in a very visual way. In fact since I created the above collage yesterday, I've changed my mind about the backdoor color to ...

From Cath, natch

See. Told you I was fickle.

xo
elyse