Shed Exterior Finished!

I'm FINALLY done with my shed ...  the exterior anyway.  I thought we'd go back in time to revisit the history of the shed.  Here is our yard in October 2003 when we were househunting.  I suppose most people might run screaming from a yard like this, not to mention the house with all the updating it needed.  Actually, despite the fact that the market was hot, everyone did pass up this house.  It sat on the market for a year before we bought it.  Everything else we saw was either more than we wanted to spend, small or worse than this.  I remember one house that had a garden growing out of the gutters.  See the yellow patio support?  That was the color of our house.  You might say the traffic stripe yellow is whimiscal but it looked ridiculous on a street of understated white houses.

 
Back to the shed. 
In 2004, I used barn red stain on it. Below is what the shed looked like back in April before I began painting.  Not only can you see the shed improvement but there are actually live plants here now, some grass and the years and years of unraked leaves are gone.  The stain has worn over the past few years so a new paint job was in order.

Here's the inspiration picture I started with ...

And, the finished product ...

The windows don't open like in the inspiration picture, but that honestly isn't something that would have been useful for us.  Mr. T did such a good job installing those windows.  Even the old milk cans (that we use as a barrier to keep little ones out of there) got a paint job.  The white never did anything for me. 

Speaking of the windows, I forgot to take a "before" of them, but they were just beat-up, old wooden windows with white peeling paint on them.  My parents acquired a bunch of them and shared a few with me.  I had no idea what I was going to do with them when they gave them to me but here they are in their new life.  Since the white didn't work, with my plans here, they got a coat of red paint. 

The window boxes were black when I purchased them.  They also got some red paint.

I decided not to plant the plants in the window boxes.  I've done this in the past and the window boxes tend to wear a lot faster.  I purchased a few plants and just placed them inside for now.  I'm hoping to find shallow containers that I can plant in and use as liners.

These side windows actually aren't functioning at all.  I used brown paint on the glass (black would have been better, but I had brown on hand and didn't want to buy more paint) and installed them directly on the shed.  I would have loved to install more windows, but we would have lost much needed shelving space inside.  Initially, I had purchased iron trellises.  They were too big so I exchanged them, but I also realized that they just didn't "fit" with what I was going for here.  We ended up getting some simple wooden ones (that were 1/3 of the price), cutting them to fit and spray painting them a shade close to the trim green.

The inside of the shed is on the "to-do" list, but that's probably going to be a job for next year.

I've linked up to Metamorphosis Monday on Between Naps on the Porch and Project Parade on the DIY Showoff and DIY Day on A Soft Place to Land .