Remember what the front porch looked like when I bought the house? Yeah, it was hideous.
And then Mare and I went to war with it and now I have a much prettier porch that's also a lot more "correct" for the house than the old one. When we did that, I had this pie-in-the-sky dream of someday restoring the porch to the way it looked originally, with porch spandrel and railing and three posts on the corner and a hipped roof and everything. Here's a photo of my mom's friend Teresa and her husband Clarence standing in front of my house in 1946. It's the best photo of the original porch that I have.
It's beautiful. And not a bit of it exists anymore. That angers and saddens me. I'd still like to rebuild that original porch someday, but I've run the numbers on it and it's just not practical at this point. I can't justify spending the money on it when, in the not-too-distant future, I'm going to need a new roof and a new refrigerator. (And yesterday the air conditioner quit working, so there's that, in the very near future.) Besides the money, there's the mental health aspect of it. (See, Laura, I told you I seek therapy!) Thinking about all the stuff left to do on the house can really overwhelm me. That's a terrible feeling that I try to avoid whenever possible. Reminding myself of the difference between "want" and "need", keeping to a budget, and avoiding debt are great coping strategies.
So, I decided to keep the porch I have.
And I decided that since I'd already put a lot of paint on the house in the preceding three days, I should continue that trend by painting some of the front porch.
And a porch post and a couple of brackets.
WTB said I should "go crazy" with paint and put color on all the small parts of the porch posts, so I used all the colors for the house on the post and brackets. (I need to get a smaller brush and touch up some spots.)
He has really good ideas. Just in case anyone's wondering what the colors are: the white is Gilded Linen, the lightest gray is Montpelier Ashlar Gray, the medium gray is Mountain Smoke, and the dark gray is English Tea Party. It's all Valspar.
What do y'all think of it so far?