New Little Old House

Our porch is not pretty. In fact, it’s beyond ugly. It’s the one space we haven’t really touched at all, except to take down the awful bamboo shades we inherited.

We haven’t worked on the porch for several reasons. First, it’s literally falling off of the house. At some point it will need to be completely torn off and replaced. That’s a big and expensive project far off in the future, but it means we don’t want to pour tons of time and money into perfecting the porch right now.

The porch is also just a lot of work. The window sills are all rotten (and some are really crooked due to the porch falling off), a few of the window panes are missing or cracked, and the whole thing is just covered in grime and about 15 layers of peeling paint. We’re afraid to pull up the gold shag carpet.

But we’d really use the porch a lot more if it weren’t so embarrassingly ugly. It would also be nice if porch gave visitors an accurate first impression of our home. So we’re finally getting around to a makeover. First, we had to clean out all of the stuff:

I spent an entire afternoon scrubbing the walls. We used some peel-stop paint and then primer to improve the worst spots. Getting a perfect paint job would take weeks with all that we’d have to strip, scrape, and sand, so we’re not aiming too high.

For now, we just want to get the place painted and put down some new carpet on top of the old. We’ve already got a bit of furniture that will be fine for the time being. Down the road we’ll get the windows passably fixed. There’s also a window opening into the office/front bedroom that someone inexplicably boxed out and turned into a shelf unit from the inside. (So ugly… one of those many wtf moments you encounter in a house that has changed hands many times over many years.) We’ve got the window to put in that spot, so we’ll do that at some point.

Soon I’ll have some photos to share of the prettification part!