Posts Boxed Out

In this post I talked about our failed attempts at getting rid of lead paint that resulted in even better porch posts. However I never shared the after photos!

After cutting the wood to size and installing it, Pascal and I primed it with oil based primer, caulked all the cracks, and painted with exterior high gloss white paint. Once the wood was up the finishing steps were not hard! I am happy with the finished result. I think it makes a big difference from the blue posts that were too skinny. Although now the crisp white paint is making the rest of the house look dirtier...Still working on that. I would recommend buying the pre-primed wood planks for a smoother finish but we can live with the somewhat textured pressure treated wood.

I just like this picture because my plants are alive

You can see how our aluminum trim looks dingy now next to the posts

A Post About Posts

When we moved in the exterior trim on our house was all the same faded blue- the doors, shutters, and the porch posts. And it all stayed the same until this spring when we finally painted the front door and updated the posts. The paint on the posts was particularly bad. I don't know if they were ever primed but they were flaking and peeling particularly the sides with the most sun exposure. I don't really have any before pictures but here is one that just so happens to be during one of our few snow storms. So I was really taking a picture of the snow not the porch...

You can't see any peeling paint but I just like this picture of our house in the snow so I am including it...

This porch project went through a couple phases and had its ups and downs. It first started with me trying to scrape the paint off so that we could repaint the original posts. I don't know if I have mentioned but I am terrible at sanding/scraping. Mostly because I give up too quickly. So I scraped the posts and then even primed one of them before my husband saw it. And it was very rough and bumpy. Not a good look. You can see in the below picture that one of the posts is white...It looks good from a distance.

Since the scraping didn't work that well I was then going to try power sanding. That was when my husband thought to use one of the lead paint tests that we had bought for an old antique door. So we did the quick test and found...that the blue paint was lead paint. So we really shouldn't be sanding it and creating dust that would not be good for us or the nearby plants. 

I like this picture because you can see my plants from last year growing back in :)

So the next thing that I tried was stripping the paint off with my gel Citristrip. That was an epic fail. It was a lot of surface to cover and I wasted a lot of the stripper. After applying it and then spending only about 15 minutes trying to scrape the paint off I gave up. It was going to take forever and I didn't like the original posts that much to work this hard to save them. That was when I suggested to Pascal that we cover (and thus seal up) the lead paint with wood which would also make the porch posts look sturdy, chunky, and modern. Although this option would cost more I thought it would be a big improvement to the porch. And would not require me to get rid of all the old paint. It would however require work from Pascal but he was on board after some convincing.

The post is white-ish from the dried stripping gel.

I took off these decorative pieces that were really not my style anyways. 

 We measured our posts and went to the hardware store. We needed 1x6x8's and 1x4x8's (two sides of the posts with 1x4's and two sides with 1x6's). We ended up buying the pressure treated wood. We looked at the pre-primed wood but that was significantly more expensive. We spent less than a $100 on the 16 pieces of wood. Now that we have already done it I would recommend spending the extra money on the pre-primed wood. It gives you a clean smooth surface and saves you the step of priming. Our posts are not completely smooth.

Pascal had to cut the wood some to fit with his table saw and then put up the 1x4's first. He used his brad nail gun to attach them and also added a couple of screws.

The 1x6's were added on the front and backs of the posts overlapping the 1x4's. So you can see lines between the two pieces of wood from the side but not the front and back. 

That is our old down spout that we also replaced

 First post done! Pascal works hard....goes to work and then comes home to work some more.

After putting up all the wood the next steps were priming, painting, and caulking all the cracks and gaps. Finished pictures coming next!

My Attempt at Gardening

 When we moved into our house two years ago our garden looked something like this...A bunch of weeds, a bunch of grass, and some miscellaneous flowers and bushes. I just wanted to start from scratch since I couldn't even tell what was a weed and what was supposed to be there. My grandmother actually got it started with digging some of it up (while my great aunt was helping to paint my bedroom-they're young).

The first spring in the house I finally got all of the plants up. It was a work out so I would say gardening is not exactly a leisurely activity...it requires work. I wonder how many calories you can burn gardening?

There were some plants on the left side of the porch as well but once I dug those up I just planted grass there. I can only manage one "finished" spot with plants for now. 

There was some plastic brick trim around the area as well that I dug up. You can see in the below picture that the grass around the sidewalk was very overgrown. Pascal took care of that with a square shovel and a weedwacker. 

We gained a lot of sidewalk, it was amazing. We still need to power-wash the sidewalk as it is stained where the grass was overgrown. 

The driveway had to be trimmed out as well. 

My grandmother helped me pick out some plants and I spent about $200 between flowers and the brick trim. Most of the plants that I bought are perennials so they will come back the next year (Shocker I didn't kill them-they all actually did come back this past summer!). I decided to buy the white brick trim as we had the same brick trim in red around the trees in the front yard. You can see some of it on the porch. There was an empty circle of brick in the yard that we pulled out. I guess there used to be a tree there and they took the tree out but never the brick?

The garden did pretty well this summer although right now it is pretty dead...I need some more fall plants. We just wanted flowers, not bushes, so it is pretty sad looking all winter. I will have another post on what we did with the terrible blue porch posts and a picture of the whole porch update soon!

Changing Exterior Lights for $1

We have basic tarnished gold exterior lights at our house. They aren't anything exciting and are not the shape I would pick if I could choose. But changing them out is not a cost or project that I want to take on right now. Soo I decided to paint them...I mean, I paint everything else, right? Now I have seen various people use spray paint but that would require protecting a lot of surfaces or taking the light off the house as I am a very messy painter. Instead, I went to the craft store and found some metallic craft paint. It was Martha Stewart's metallic multi-surface acrylic craft paint. I had a coupon so it was about a $1. I used one bottle for two lights.

So this is an easy project but kind of boring. Which is why it is taking me so long to actually finish all of the lights. I did one last year and one a couple months ago and I still have some more to do. I just used a small paint brush and put on three thin coats. I had to stand on a stool and my weak arms got tired haha. I did listen to music put it took over an hour for one light. Which isn't really bad. 

And here is a before and after.

Now I don't think this paint was meant for this project or outside...However I will stay it is still in perfect condition. The one I did last year is under the porch so it is more protected from the elements. The one I did three months ago is out in the open and still looks like new. So I don't expect the paint to stay perfect for years but for a $1 update I will take whatever I can get. 

Quick Chair Update

My grandmother gave me two outdoor chairs when we first moved into our house so we could have some extra seating on the deck. They needed an update but I just got around to it last month. I bought three cans of exterior spray paint for a change that took half hour.

I first sanded down the rust and dirt on the chair. Once they were clean I just did a couple light coats of spray paint. They are a solid color for now but I may add some stripes later. The two chairs are now on the front porch with my stenciled bench.

Stenciled Bench

I was gifted this wooden bench a couple months ago. I primed it and then it sat for a while because I wasn't sure where I wanted to use it. I finally decided to put it on the front porch. I painted it white but then wanted to do something else to brighten it up. 

I decided to use some of the leftover paint from our front door. At first I tried a stencil on the seat with a patterned piece of paper...that didn't work so I wiped it right off. So then I went on Pinterest and found this tutorial from House Tweaking. Since a toilet paper roll is something that I had laying around and required no money I decided to give it a go. I just dipped it right into the quart of paint.

My circles are mostly straight and some have more paint than others. About halfway through, the toilet paper roll started coming apart so I just switched to the other side. I think it looks pretty good considering it was free and the stenciling took less than half an hour!

Front Door: From Blah to Bright

When we first moved into our house all of the exterior doors, trim, and shutters were all painted the same blue. Blue is my favorite color but not this blue...it was also very faded. I thought about painting the front door for almost two years and we finally did it this past spring. Once we did I couldn't believe we waited so long. It did take a while to decide a color. We talked about various blues, yellows, and teals. In the end we ended up walking into the store and just picking a color without even sampling it! It is bright and fun and if we get sick of it it will be a quick fix to change. 

We picked "Caribbean Sea" by Glidden. It is the high gloss exterior/interior paint. One quart was about $11. My husband volunteered to do the paint job as he is more of a perfectionist than myself and the front door is the first thing you see after all. 

By the way, I don't love this door. But it is the door we have and there is nothing wrong with it. One thing I didn't like was the yellow plastic around the glass so I primed that with oil based primer and then Pascal painted it the same color as the door. It helps to make the gold in the glass less offensive.

Pascal cut in with a brush first and then rolled with a small foam brush. It took two coats. He started in the morning so we could keep the door open all day. 

In  addition to painting the door we also bought new door knobs to replace the old gold ones. There are so many beautiful options but I went the cheap route for now...I found a basic brushed stainless steel doorknob set from Lowe's for $30. And it came with two! So we can replace the ones on our back door too.

We also bought a vinyl sticker to add our house number to the door. I was inspired by several pictures on Pinterest like this one. And I wanted to take down the small brass numbers on our porch post that are barely visible from the street anyways. 

I searched Etsy and there were a lot of options. I made the mistake of not paying more attention  to measurements and the first one I ordered was too small...So then I found one from a different company and ordered the right size for only $6! I thought this was a really good price for a large 5 digit house number and cheaper than other shops.  It came quickly and had detailed instructions for application. Since I don't want to show a picture of our actual house numbers here is a picture from the Etsy store TM Decals where I bought mine.You can pick different fonts and colors but I just went with white.

Photo Credit TM Decals

And here is an after picture of my door...With a piece of paper to cover the number because I am better at using tape than a computer to edit the number out.

Now I just need to update the storm door...oh and of course the siding.