Front Porch Before, Before, and After

Welcome to the new and improved front porch!

I'm going to start this post with an "after" pic from this last weekend and not the "before" or the "before, before", because I don't want to scare you all off.  That's what the "before, before" look of this house did to me. I really didn't want to go inside, because I was so turned off by the dated ranch look of it. But thank goodness my husband forced me to. 

Last Fall after our renovation guys got started here at the house we had an updated look with the natural timbers made from rough cedar. We had always planned on painting them, but did cedar because we were heading into the cold weather season and knew we wouldn't get around to painting it until Spring. Plus we felt like the cedar would be sturdier and outlast regular wood. We really loved the natural look, but it really wasn't an option because of the overhang of the white porch ceiling.

OK, so yikes, here is the photo from the listing last Summer. It's obvious that this house was built in the 60's because of the wrought iron work. It's not that I hate this look. I've actually seen this scrolly/filigree iron work on little cottages that looked darn cute, but to me it just didn't match the house... and it was a huge detriment to the overall look of the house in my opinion.

Here's the orange front door last week. Changing it up was another big priority of mine. I love orange, or "Pumpkin", just not on my front door. That shade was just too "in my face" and one more thing to tick off the boxes of things I wasn't happy about with the front porch.

When you look at the two colors you really can't tell much of a difference, but when I started painting the door panels we really got a sense of the darker color, which is "Spicy Hue" from Sherwin Williams. 

And no, I didn't take the door off the hinges, nor remove the hardware. I just taped them off, and honestly the paint is really good and doesn't drip, run, or splatter, so that wasn't a problem. I did one coat on Saturday, then the second and third coat on Sunday. We have the storm door, so it wasn't a problem. My husband did give it a good hand sanding before I started, but that's it. We used Sherwin Williams Resilience Exterior Paint, which was super easy to work with.

I was going to go with something gray or black to play it safe, but my sis pointed out that the front porch was shaded and kind of dark so I had to think about what might work. A Gray and some sort of Red/Clay/Persimmon color combo kept coming up. My husband wanted a darker reddish burgundy, but I wanted something with a little more oomph to it. I felt like anything dark would just get lost there, and a dark red would look brown from the street.

I also painted the lower part of the door surround panels which had been painted gray

 to help balance out the look of the windows, but just didn't seem right to me.

I really love this color, and it still has some "brightness" to it, 

but it's not too light or scary. For me, it's a Goldilocks color.

 The door actually does look a little on the red side from the walkway and street.

 We used Sherwin Williams Exterior Duration for the porch

 in straight out of the can, no tint, white.

So now I feel like it looks more like what it should have looked all along. No, it's not over the top noticeable or WOW, but more in keeping with the cohesive look of the front of the house and porch. Hopefully, the next step will be removing the old shrubs and reworking the front landscaping. I'm a fan of Boxwood and Azaleas, so I hope to include those. There are a couple of smaller Hydrangea bushes I hope we can also keep, but I'm open to whatever the landscape people want to suggest. I'm sure hoping they can get to it by Fall. I didn't get to decorate my porches for Fall last year, and I missed out on the best kind of  "Pumpkin" time.

*this is not a sponsored post

Have a great weekend, friends!

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