The porch project

A side post today.  I am patting myself on the back.  Just ask John about how proud I am of my work! Here is the porch in all its glory.  This was pretty much my project to do.  John replaced the 2 rotten boards (thank you!), but left the rest to me.  Not only did I do the floor, but I noticed peeling paint on the front wall, so I just went ahead and scraped and painted that, too.  It ended up taking almost 5 weeks to finish (work, biking and life getting in the way… )

Before:  We were testing a light versus dark color there.

 

The porch had multple layers of paint.  Instead of scraping those up – whoever just painted right over, which just is a crappy thing to do because it peels back up again.

There was (in order from top coat down) a grey color, blue, white and on the front porch some of that awful glued down green felt.  They painted right over that.  Quality work, I tell you…

Lovely, eh?

So, I used a heat gun to scrape up the layered stuff.  I didn’t try on the single layer of paint because the surface of the wood was a little friable and would scrape off with the paint, so I only got off the loose stuff on the rest of the porch.

After scraping:

It always looks worse before it gets better!

All done!

from the doorway:

The front part of the porch.

Here is more where you can also see the wall that I painted.

Looking good for a 100+ year old house!  Next big project is the inside flooring!

21 thoughts on “The porch project

  1. Cammy@TippyToeDiet

    It looks great! (There’s nothing like finishing a difficult project, is there? Ahhh….)

    My original owners painted over wallpaper, but fortunately, they left the green felt on the patio “as is.” It came up in one solid piece without a lot of effort. If they’d painted over that, I probably would have just tiled over all of it. LOL

  2. Forever Young

    It looks great! I just finished painting my entire first floor and I just painted. I can appreciate all the hard work you put into getting the porch into “paintable” condition. I hope you get time to sit back and enjoy it.

  3. Ali @ Peaches and Football

    Absolutely fantastic! It has to look bad at the beginning too for the “after” shots to look all the more impressive. Job well done! Reminds me of when we painted Ben’s fence and how much better it looked – until the next day when all the birds landed on it and messed it up. Ha ha you won’t have to worry about that and I love the green color!!!!!

  4. Helen

    Every time I see one of your home projects, I think what a shame it is that you couldn’t just do this sort of thing full time. Buy a house, fix it, flip it. You are so good at this stuff!

    1. Lori Post author

      I’ve actually flipped 2 houses. The market is down and getting financed for flipping is almost impossible now, which is why I stopped.

  5. Another Lori

    That looks fantastic! I love the color you chose. I think I’d spend all my time sitting on the porch if it looked that pretty!

  6. Sharon

    Looks great! I’d be useless cause I be sitting on the porch all day long alternating between reading and just watching the world go by!

  7. Biz

    I am so glad you went with the darker color – love that it matches the window frame!! Now, if you do any roof work, can you head over to Illinois?!

  8. julie

    I’ve been fixing up a house to rent out, and the quality paint job was awful. A lot of it needed scraping and sanding, what a mess. I tried to help out myself, then figured that I’d rather just pay someone, which is really expensive, but I couldn’t stand it. Good for you for cleaning that up yourself.

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