The Big Porch Reveal

My new camera has arrived and I LOVE it! It's the Olympus Pen EPL-1. I won't spend a lot of time talking about it, but if you're in the market for a new camera and a DSLR intimidates you, then look into the Pen line.

Anyway, with the arrival of the new camera comes what you've been waiting for. The big front porch reveal!

So, as you'll recall, this is what the front porch looked like when we bought the house (or at least in the listing photos, with the prior owner's furniture).

And this is what it looked like for the past year. 

But I'm happy to say that it is much better now.

It is much brighter and cleaner out there and I'm really happy with the way the whole thing turned out.

Check out some details.

Terra cotta pots of ivy hung from bird hooks. I'm hoping the ivy grows and cascades over the pot and down in the next few years...if my black thumb doesn't kill it.

Canary, Blue Jay and Cardinal - $7 each, on clearance at Arhaus

Bench from Target - $160 on sale. Pillow fabric from Fabric.com

I think the pillows really made everything look much more cozy. 

Garden Stool from Big Lots - $20, plus $6 can of copper spray paint

Stripe Painting - FREE! Wood my Dad had on hand, and paint I already had. 

$15 in materials to hang it, though.

New light fixture, with motion sensor - $55 at Lowe's

New vinyl screen door - $135 at Lowe's

And who is enjoying the front porch most? 

 

Okay, really Bessie and Daisy couldn't care less how fabulous the porch looks, they're just happy to be out there chasing crickets and watching the birds. 

Care to know what it cost? About $600 for the whole thing. The biggest ticket items took up most of that, the bench, the door, the light fixture and the door knob for the door (which we had to special order since a inward swinging screen door is not the norm).

Next, I'll be taking on the den. The room where Adam and I spend most of our time. I'm planning on assembling a mood board this weekend! See you then!

Such a Tease

I bummed a camera off my dad (the man had 3!) until I get my new one. That means I have some pictures for you! I'm not quite ready to expose it all yet, the porch still isn't QUITE done, but it's rounding the last corner. Hopefully this weekend...cross your fingers!

So here are some teaser pictures. Some are a little blurry, my Dad's camera has a bit of a learning curve and a much smaller screen than I'm used to, making it difficult to tell if the photo is blurry before I download them.

Keep an eye out next week for the big reveal! We're just a door knob and light fixture away!

Excuses, excuses

On Sunday night I wrote up a lovely post updating what was happening with the front porch, and the progress that's been made. I saved it to add some "Teaser Pictures" later when the light was better for photo-taking.

Today, I went outside to take some pictures for all of you, got a few and then...something bad happened.

My camera died.

I dropped it a while back, which wasn't the first time I dropped it, believe me, but it did do some damage this time. It was having some focus problems and the zoom lens wasn't moving like it was supposed to. But I was getting it to work okay. And then today, something happened, I don't know what, and the lens jammed and now the camera won't even start up.

I've been looking into buying a new camera anyway, and I was just kind of stalling, but the time has come and I'll be ordering a new one as soon as a minor glitch with my PayPal account is cleaned up.

In the meantime, I have this for you, since I've been very light on the pictures lately.  I imagine Adam feels I talk like this all the time. (Click to "Embiggen" it)

from Wondermark

 And because I'm excited about the little bit left to do on the porch, here's the remaining to do list.

- hang pots planted with sweet potato vine
- install new door knob on screen door
- install new light fixture
- paint and install screen trim
- paint garden stool

My original plan to hang something on one of the walls isn't going to work out, so I'm going to have to come up with something else on the fly.

Getting there...

Front Porch Progress Report:

- The "walls" have been painted. They're hardly walls, though. There are only 2 of them and they only come up to waist height.
- about 80% of the trim is painted
- The 20 ft. wall has had all the screen removed and the wood that was behind it has been painted. 
- The ceiling has been scraped and sanded
- A new screen door has been ordered and is supposed to arrive at Lowe's on August 8th (which is a Sunday...so we'll see).
- A ceiling color has been chosen and purchased, I'm going to try the blue.
- Pillow fabric and pillow forms are sitting in the dining room ready for sewing
- I got a bench to put along the wall by the front door at Target, on sale! 

Still to do:
- Paint remainder of trim
- Paint the ceiling
- Remove about 10 more feet of screen and paint the wood behind it
- Replace the screen we took down and reapply the trim that was on top of it.
- Pick up and hang new screen door
- Hang decorative "bird hooks"
- Buy some sweet potato vine, plant it and hang pots from bird hooks
- Make pillows 
- Talk Adam into replacing the light fixture, then purchase light fixture, then install light fixture
- Paint the blue ceramic stool

I was all excited about the progress made so far, and now that I've written this list I feel really behind. The weather is supposed to be nice for the rest of this week though, so hopefully I'll get the rest of the painting done, the pillows made and the sweet potato vine planted.

I hope to have progress pictures with the next post. I don't want to reveal too much just yet! This is a fairly small make over, and of course I want to suck as many posts out of it as possible.

I'll show you what it looked like before though.

Note to self: Remove tags from the back of the chairs...

I got the furniture last year on sale at Home Depot (Originally at $400 3 piece set, marked down to $200. I managed to get them to throw in 2 extra chairs for $100...so, 5 piece set, $300). The rug was $25 at a Pier One that was going out of business, and the blue stool was $20 at Big Lots and I'm going to paint it...something. I'm thinking something punchy and fun, but we'll see.

You can see my paint samples on the wall, I went with the more muted green. All the trim will be Ultra White. Nothing is happening to the stone walls.

I've got a mixture of green and terra cotta fabrics to make pillows. The fireplace doors that have sat out there since January were taken away by a lucky Freecycler (I got two Craigslist offers for them a few days later...after the listing had been up for a MONTH). I bought a bench at Target on sale that is sitting against the wall where the fireplace doors are in this picture.

I'm hoping to replace this light fixture:

With something a little more like this:

Here's the kicker. 3 weeks until I go back to work...I want to get this porch done before then.

Will I make it? Stay tuned.

Treasures of the internet

Did you ever start out looking for something on the internet and through a random series of clicks find out something you never knew? Here's what happened to me.

I've been noticing small groupings of white spots all over our terra cotta tile on the front porch. I never knew what this was until a spider made a web between the screen and glass of one of our windows and I noticed the same spots appeared under the web.

It's spider droppings...or if we're being crude, it's spider poop, on our front porch tile. 

Just to double check my hypothesis, I started Googling "spider poop"  (it turned up some surprisingly tame results). Apparently spider poop is a big problem for people who detail boats. It's tough to remove. I learned this as I was power-washing our front porch and nothing was removing these white spots.

Various boat detailers were offering up noxious chemicals to take care of this problem, but then one guy had a suggestion that amazed me:

Paint the ceiling  where your boat is stored sky blue.

Apparently this does something causing the spiders not to build webs there and can even deter wasps and other bugs. They think it's the sky, which is not a good place for bugs to hang out in order to not get eaten. I remember lots of sky blue ceilings on porches when my husband and I went to Key West, and it's a popular color for wrap around porch ceilings, especially in the South. The color is called "haint blue" (haint's being evil spirits, and the blue was also meant to drive them away) When you Google the topic of sky blue porch ceilings, reviews are mixed. Some people say it helps with the critter population, others say the bugs couldn't care less. There a possibility that the make-up of paint, since paints in the "olden days" were made with lye, which is a natural insect repellent. Modern paints without lye would not likely have the same effect.

 (image from Apartment Therapy) 

I was on the fence about painting the porch ceiling a color. I had been thinking about doing a nice blue shade up there, and had finally decided that I was just going to go with white, because blue wasn't part of the color scheme out there. But now I'm seriously considering trying the blue to see if it fools the spiders.

Because I need to prove my mental dominance over spiders...

On keeping cool and heating a house

Well, needless to say I did NOT get the front porch painted when it was 87 outside the other day. What can I say, I've never been one to jump the gun. It's been in the mid 90s outside since.

I did buy the paint, and I'm just waiting for the gods of summertime to get the temperatures down below 90. A quick peek on weather.com says it will be 80 on Thursday. 80! Did you read that (of course you did). Let me stress it one more time...aaaaaay-tee. It's hard to ask for anything much more pleasant than that in July in Maryland.

And what am I doing Thursday? I'm probably working. ::sigh:: Ain't it always the way?

I can see that what I'm going to end up doing is A) painting in the heat and being generally miserable while doing it or B) busting out the work lights and painting after the sun goes down, when it's cooler, but of course making the house look like the Starship Painter-prise from the outside. I can just see my neighbors now; looking out their windows thinking "what on earth is going on over at THAT house? Weirdos..."

Get used to it Neighbors, we are pretty weird.

Although, on the subject of weird neighbors, there's a pretty awesome feud going on between two houses in the neighborhood. One house has a huge banner (that they clearly had professionally printed) saying "CHIMNEY SMOKE KILLS NEIGHBORS" while the guy across the street from him has spray painted "PAY MY HEATING BILL AND WE STOP BURNING" on a sheet of plywood and propped it up in his yard. This has been going on for nearly a year now. Personally, I'm on the side of the guy burning wood in his fireplace. But then I like the smell of woodsmoke when the weather gets cool. 

Maryland: where the weather today is completely different from the weather tomorrow.

Things that stress me out....in a minor way:

I just spent today power washing the front porch in preparation to get painting/improving out there (it just feels so much cleaner now) Obviously I can't start painting until it's completely dry. So today is out. Tomorrow it will be 87 degrees outside. Not horribly hot, but not pleasant either.

The next 10 days? Either 90 + degrees OR thunderstorms. So if I want to paint in at least moderately tolerable conditions, it's tomorrow or sometime after the next 10 days, which might not actually get any cooler.

Guess I'll be buying paint tonight....