The Front Porch

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You know we have been having a lot of chats on my porch and it has occurred to me that I don’t have my porch on my farmhouse tour yet. So please grab drink of your choice and settle in for a bunch of pictures of the story of our porch makeover. Seriously we took a lot of pictures – if you happen to be drinking wine you might just want to bring the bottle with you – once again I repeat there are A LOT of pictures. 🙂

To start off our little slide show here is a picture of the porch from when we first moved in. Needs a little loving and the shrubs are covering all the beautiful wood work.

I believe the last time the porch got a some major work done was in the 70’s. It was very popular to carpet your outdoor flooring at that time.

The first thing we did was remove the shrubs.  There was a total of 6 shrubs.  We just wet the ground really good, chained the shrubs to the pickup and pulled them out.  Matthew insisted I take a photo after each shrub was removed but I will spare you and just show you a couple 😉

They’re gone!

Then I planted some new landscaping.  I chose to do a rose bush that will fill out but not get very tall.

And here’s some more pretty flowers I planted.  I transplanted most of them from my mom and mother-in-law’s gardens.

Now it was time to tackle the floor.  First got to pull up all that old carpet.

After that we needed to pull up the plywood subfloor.  I think there was about four hundred nails that needed to be cat-clawed out of each sheet – no joke.  The kids were “helping”.  You can see from the looks on their faces that it wasn’t a very fun job.  My husband had the same look on his face.

I believe in this next photo I may have been having a moment of “Oh my gosh how are we going to get this done with 4 kids.”

That’s when its good to have a dog to perk you back up and get you back in the game.

After we got all the plywood pulled up we discovered that the ends of the joists were starting to rot. The neat thing was these joists had come from an old grainery on the farm that had been torn down many,many years ago so we got some awesome reclaimed wood out of the deal  – remember the mud closet bench!

My husband worked so hard replacing the joists.  I did most of the cutting but the long tedious muscle work came down to him.  After the new joists were in place we got back on track putting down the new cedar flooring.

And boy did it turn out better than I could have hoped for.

After a fresh coat of paint and new shingles the house is shining again.

My husband and I have always dreamed of having a front porch.  We still pinch ourselves that we actually have one.  It was amazing to sit out on it this last fall and enjoy our beautiful country view.

I hope you have enjoyed the slideshow and if you are at the bottom of your wine bottle you may want to read this again tomorrow 😉