Shut The Front Door.

No really, shut the front door. It's so ugly I can't look at it anymore. When we first looked at this house I really didn't even notice the condition of the door (among other things, in my defense it was night time). Look at this sad front porch, not a very welcoming "welcome home" each day.

 Fortunately our landlord has been really good about letting us fix up some things around the house, and this was one of the first things on my list of things to do. It was tricky picking out a color at first. I wanted something that would really stand out, and look inviting. I took a photo and played around on my computer with a few options:

Green, Red

Yellow, Dark Blue

I've seen quite a few people paint their doors red in an effort to make them pop. This doesn't always turn out to be a good decision (in my opinion), but for awhile I was really wanting to do red (although it was one color our landlord specifically said not to use, along with black). I just thought that a red white and blue theme could really work here, but oh well. I didn't want to do yellow, because that's also been a bit too trendy lately, with yellow-grey combinations popping up everywhere. Blue seemed to be too much of the same and I was trying to get a fresh look for this house. So I settled on green. I had found some really cute houses on Pinterest of light blue houses with green doors that seemed quite charming.

While I was in the midst of trying to decide my husband and I were watching our semi-annual worldwide church conference on TV and I noticed that one of the speakers had a tie on that seemed to speak to me. The light blue color was so similar to our house and I just loved the stripes of cobalt blue and yellow. Aah, inspiration comes in the funniest places. Using a screen shot of the speaker I played around with my house picture to try and match his tie to a paint color I could use.

So I quickly abandoned my thought of a green door and headed off to the paint store to pick up some Daring Indigo by Behr. What really sealed the deal for me going back to blue was that it reminded me of the dress Kate Middleton wore to announce their engagement a few years ago, very elegant.

Now with a color picked out it's time to get down to the nitty-gritty. Or rather the rusty and musty.

Even once it got to this stage it looked so much better!

This sad little mail box had to go. 

I can't believe what a little bit of sanding and fresh coat of paint will do for curb appeal! So much more inviting. I love it, thanks Elder Clarke for wearing such a fetching tie for your general conference talk!

 I've since added a wreath, and am looking for a cute new mailbox (I saw an adorable red tall "Post" mailbox at HomeSense and really should have not passed it by because I think it's long gone).