Matt and I celebrated 6 years of marriage on May 9th! It's been the best 6 years ever. To celebrate, we spent the afternoon working on our house's curb appeal! (Actually, we went out for a really nice dinner that night, but this happened on our anniversary too.)
I have been wanting to paint our front door since the day we moved in. Why? Because it was purple! It actually had a very fresh coat of paint from the previous owners, so it was in good shape. But the homeowner had tried to pick a light grey and you know how funny grey can be with all it's undertones, and the end result was a purple door. A very FLAT purple door - matte paint is something else I'm not a big fan of.
Being that this summer is the first one in this house where I won't have a tiny baby or be pregnant, we declared it the summer we tackle some outside projects. First on the list - the front door! While I love the idea of having a fun, bright-colored door, that just wasn't going to go with the style of our house. After spending lots of time standing in the front yard staring at the house, I decided charcoal grey could be the winner. I picked up three different samples and slapped them up on the door. Our door was multi-colored for about a week. The top color was way too blue; it was easy to eliminate. Matt liked the bottom one but I thought the middle one picked up the brown tones in our brick better so it ultimately won out. (You can see a spot from where we changed the hardware that at one point the door was red!)
Since our hardware was fairly new, I had Matt remove it to keep it clean. Painting the door was a quick, easy process. Thankfully, the weather was not too hot that day so it wasn't terrible having the door open for an hour or so. We set a fan up just inside the door to help keep bugs from flying in. Here is the door with one coat of wet paint on it.
And here it is later that evening with two coats of paint and the hardware back on. I know the glare from the picture make it look shiny (and dented?) but it really isn't in person. It's just not super flat anymore (or purple!).
What was Matt doing while I painted the door? He was tackling our front columns! (Our work was almost all done while both kids were napping...hooray for a productive nap time!)
We have six wooden columns across the front of our porch and I noticed over the winter how completely sun bleached they were. I'm sure when the house was built 19 years ago they had a much darker stain on them!
Just like with the door, we tested out a stain color in an inconspicuous spot. We went with a semi-transparent stain - something that would add color but still let some of the wood grain show through.
Matt got the short end of the stick because he had a lot more surface area to cover than I did! He ended up doing two coats of stain to make the color good and rich. You can see in the photo below the difference in color - the columns on the left have stain and the ones on the right do not.
Ready for the full before and after? Hopefully you can tell a difference, ha! Here is the house before we started painting - except that the door has the test swatches on it.
And here it is after our afternoon's worth of work. A deeper color on the door and rich stain on the columns. I think it looks better, do you? It helps that our flower beds had also been mulched that week!
Now, what should we do next out here? I plan on moving the three adirondack chairs that sit on the right side to a different part of the house this summer (and painting them, which is a job I'm dreading) so I will eventually need new furniture for out here. What kind would you put on our porch? I want something that looks nice but isn't incredibly expensive. We rarely sit on the porch so it doesn't have to be super comfortable. And I've learned that the squirrels will just pull the stuffing out of my cushions so it doesn't really need to have those. Thoughts?? I'm at a loss. What do you think about a porch swing?