When we first moved into our ranch house, one of my first goals was to update the front of the house. We are on a tight budget so it had to be a small makeover. I knew I wanted something more modern and sleek, and something including stone. Here are a few photos of how the home looked when we bought it.
As you can see, there was nothing terribly wrong with the front of the house. It just did not feel like “our style”. It had a lot going on, the step up to the wood landing was just a beam (not secure at all), and there was no real use for us to have that deck area in the front of the house. In addition, you can see from the third photo that the wood was not cut evenly on the sides so it did not have the clean and sleek look I was going for.
My inspiration for the front of the house was minimal, modern, and earthy. I spent so many months on Pinterest finding inspiration. We went to a local stone yard and picked out a stone we loved. It was simple, the stones were large (so we wouldn’t need too many of them), and the color was a beautiful gray.
After choosing our stones, we got to work. The hardest part was deconstructing the decking that was there already. This process took a day or two to complete.
After removing the decking, we found a concrete block (what was once the walkway, I assume) as well as an old electrical cord. We removed the old electrical cord and installed a new GFI outlet on the side of the house during this process. Once all of these steps were done, it was time to begin installing the new walkway stones!
We still have a significant amount of work to do out here, and are looking forward to getting started. What do you think? Do you like the stone walkway?
