Drab to Fab

I love a great front porch, who doesn't? They are so homey and inviting. Enter our front porch.

Not exactly your picture of a great front porch, huh? This picture was taken after Jake had already torn down the old ceiling, which you would not want to stand under too long for fear of it collapsing on you. We replaced the old, crumbling ceiling with 3 sheets of bead board, which you can kind of see in the picture. Here's a better view of the new ceiling that doesn't have you running into the house for fear of being buried under it.

It was really a fairly simple switcheroo since the beams that held up the old ceiling were still pretty solid. We just held up the bead board and screwed it into the old rafters that were already there, making sure to leave a hole thru which to hang a new light fixture.

Next came tackling the plain jane white house. Now a few white houses are cute and can pull off being solely white, ours however, is not one of those, especially since the white came in varying shades of peeling. So, knowing that we wanted to paint the door blue (we actually did this project before the blue door) we tried to think of colors that would look good with the blue and add interest to the outside of our ho-hum house. One of the hottest colors in home design right now is gray. Gray can do no wrong in my book. It's just so versatile and can make things look oh-so-sophisticated. We got several different swatches of gray from our trusty Lowes and got to work taping them up where we planned to paint and looking at them at different times of the day. Since the porch faces North, the sun only hits it at certain times of the day and during certain times of the year, so this color had to look great in all lighting conditions. After considering several colors for a day or two we finally decided on the winner. It was a nice, stormy gray that complemented the white and blue without being overpowering. So began the scraping and painting. As you could see in the top picture, our paint was chipping bad, so it definitely needed scraped, if it hadn't been chipping though, we may have just gone straight on to the painting. Good thing it was chipping though, because if we hadn't scraped we may not have found this.

That's right, a rotting pillar. Thankfully it was only one side of the pillar, so it wasn't that difficult to replace. Jake just tore off the rotted side

And replace it with a new piece that he cut to size. We're just very thankful that we caught it before it caused much larger problems. So, with that out of the way we were able to get on with the painting. Once again, to jog your memory, here's the before:

And here's the it's crazy amazing what paint can do, after:

Doesn't it look so much chicer and just all around great?! We have since painted the rest of the concrete white too, and the door blue, but I don't have a picture of that other than the one from the recent blizzard, so if the snow throws you for a loop against all the other summertime pictures, I thoroughly apologize.

As you can see in the picture, we've painted the concrete part of the pillars white, along with the front of the porch, and even the front of the steps, but you can't see that because it's covered with snow. I'll try to get a picture with the sun out as soon as all the snow melts. In the mean time, here's a close up picture of the porch ceiling after it was painted and the light fixture was hung.

Looks great doesn't it? I love how sophisticated the gray looks with the white. Oh, and we got that new light fixture from Lowes for only $10! (it was actually part of a two piece set; we put the other one in the kitchen).

So that's the story of how our front porch went from being boring, and let's face it, a little trashy looking to the cutest little front porch on the block.