As you may or may not know, John and I bought a house about 6 months ago, and in true Christa fashion have been working to make it our own ever since. Yes this is a different house from the last rehab post (that was a throwback), and yes unfortunately it’s a split ranch… which I’m slowly getting used to. When buying this house I swore to myself to take it slow in terms of decorating and to get a chance to feel out the place. Of course that didn’t happen as I work from home and the first things that HAD to go was the yellow walls in my office. Some may say the color I chose was no better, but a caribe blue soothes me any day over canary yellow. ANYWAY, long winded blog post short, all the walls were painted within 2 weeks of moving in (What? I’m a sucker for a fresh coat). We’ve done a lot of other improvements to the place since the painting, but truly nothing really gets more bang for the buck than a nice coat of perfectly planned out paint. Which brings me to the fence…

We moved in November, so this is really the first month we’ve had a chance to do anything outside to the place. I knew I wanted to pressure wash the house and fence the moment we got the keys. Unfortunately it is not recommended to spray high pressured freezing cold water in the dead of winter, so I had to wait FOUR months to play with our Christmas gift! And truth be told, I wasn’t sure a washing of any form would fix the age and dirt of the side fences that we had:

To my sheer AMAZEMENT, it was like instant success:

By the time it was done and dry it looked like a brand new fence! So after some inspiration from friends in North Carolina who stained their fence Cedar and it looked GORGEOUS, we ran out to the Depot and picked up some mahogany stain (we thought darker may cover the imperfections a little more). It was a one coat stain and it didn’t lie, but it took 2 $44 cans to finish the front and back of these sections.

All in all, for around $100 and 2 weekends, I think this is a project for the books. Just like paint, the bang for your buck is astonishing. One last before & after comparison: