FARMHOUSE FRIDAY - OUR FARMHOUSE PORCH - inspiring my beautiful house

Hello and welcome to this month's edition of FARMHOUSE FRIDAY!!! This month we are showing our farmhouse porches.

Our farmhouse porch has been a work in progress up until about three days ago, when we finally put a check mark next to "Finish Porch" on our to do list. When we first bought our farmhouse this area was a big screened in porch which sounds wonderful right? Wrong. It was rotting and dirty with a drop ceiling and the concrete floor had about 10 layers of peeling paint (probably lead). On top of it the porch just didn't look right design wise, it looked like someone had stuck it on the side of the house haphazardly. The picture below is of our farmhouse before we owned it but it gives you an idea of what it looked like before we did anything.

Our driveway comes up to that set of steps on the side of the house where the screen porch was. Every time people come to our house that is the door they use and I was always so embarrassed by what they had to walk through to come in. So after living in the house for 3 years we finally got to tearing it off.

Oh happy day. To our excitement we found the original stone foundation after multiple days of jack hammering.

We couldn't get rid of all of the concrete however because when they added this back corner of the house (1960s or 1970s) making the mudroom and the screened porch they poured all of the concrete at once. It was not in our budget to redo all of that so we had to leave it. We wanted to add a porch here anyways so we just build over the concrete that had to be left. The below picture shows the rebuilding process. Don't be jealous of the cinder block chimney:)

Neal filled the space underneath with rocks we collected from our property and then he mortared them in place. The goal was to tie the porch into the original part of the house and make it look like it had always been there.

We did the same at the bottom of the steps.

I planted a climbing hydrangea on the one side and a bunch of hydrangeas that my mom didn't want anymore along the front.

We just finished the porch roof underside this past weekend. Once again we used cedar fence posts to do the job. I wanted something rustic looking because I was started to feel like the porch was looking too "new" but I also wanted to use something that wouldn't rot. At $100 for all of the cedar it fit right into our budget also.

Here is the before

During

And after

Many hours of priming and painting later....

I was able to hang the awesome primitive candle chandelier (a hand me down from my mom) that has been patiently waiting in my garage for some time.

I thoroughly enjoyed being able to put pretty stuff out here finally. Since we just put the siding up last fall (see more about that here) this is the first summer that I don't feel like I am just putting lipstick on a pig.

The very old trunk is a recent antique shop find and it fits perfectly between the rocking chairs and is the perfect size to hold our bird seed can and bug spray.

We still have to finish the sides of the porch roof and we plan to put up railings probably in the fall. In the next couple weeks we will be begin working on the area to left of the porch this summer so stay tuned! Thanks for visiting and make sure to check out the rest of the Farmhouse Friday blogs below!

***Door Color - Porch Gray by Better Homes and Gardens
***House Color - White on White by Glidden
***Benches - Sisal by Martha Stewart

TOWN AND COUNTRY LIVING