Dude. I know. It’s Sunday again. Sigh. Let’s just acknowledge it and move on, okay?
Week 6. I am all over the place this week. I have some pretty plant photos for you, a preview of the house without the shutters on the window, the beautiful columns with no ugly metal railings between them, and tales of doubt-filled indecision. Sounds fun, right? Wait! Don’t leave! I promise to make this as entertaining as I can. Plus, it helps to know other people suffer doubts, right? Even those of us who pride themselves on decisiveness.
But first, I want to back track a bit and talk about my inspiration for this porch. The front porch was one of the selling points for us when we were looking at the house in 2001. Even though, at the time, it looked like this:
That’s a young me on the left with my friend Lynne, who is a master gardener and has given me so much advice over the years, starting with the basic, “that’s a weed, not a tree—get rid of it.” I am forever grateful, because seriously, I had NO CLUE. Not one. And this may have led to me and the Man of Action calling everything a “weed tree” in our yard and pulling it all out.
Despite the bleakness above: so much dirt and grime and look at that tiny bare lightbulb, oh, and also the easter decorations on the door—it was October—we saw potential. Somehow, we did. And we live in a town that is highly walkable and very social, everybody sits on their front porches and watches the neighborhood go by. We knew the size of the porch would make it a great covered outdoor entertaining space, sort of like big old southern porches in Savannah or New Orleans. And that’s where a lot of my inspiration comes from. For instance:
This is my Pinterest front porch inspiration board, if you want to check it out. The top images here are of big southern porches. The first image there is one I have held dear for a while. I love the hanging ferns, the older architecture mixed with modern clean lined furniture and lots of plants. I love the stars hidden in the rafters like pieces of artwork. The stars themselves are a bit too country-fied for my personal taste, but I love the interest they add.
So we have hung ferns every year in between the columns. BUT, we modified our own hanging system for them. These ferns do not make it through Michigan winters, and I’m terrible at keeping plants alive inside the house. So the ferns die each fall on the front porch and we replace them every spring. I hate the plastic hanging apparatus they come with—the big honking hook and the short stubby length. So, years ago, we took those plastic hangers off and modified them, like so:
The Man of Action cut the hook off and drilled a hole in the plastic that remained and attached a metal chain and hook. That added length is essential in getting the ferns to hang at a height that you can see under our eaves, but it also just looks more elegant, like the inspiration photos above. You can’t see the plastic part of the hanger because the fern hides it, you only see the chain. This system also allows us to take these hangers off the old dead ferns each fall and transfer them to the new ones in the spring. So the ferns look like so:
They will grow at least three times in size by August and fill in the space there nicely. Oh, and look! No shutters on the window! Also, no black house number plaque. The shutters haven’t come down from the French doors yet, but that will happen soon. By the way, we just filled the screw holes in the siding with caulk and you can barely see them. We were a bit worried about that, but it turned out to not be an issue.
But you will notice that the window is not painted black yet. This is where the indecision crept in and paralyzed me. On Saturday last week I scrubbed the windows, prepping for paint, and all of a sudden got distracted by how much of the interior casement windows, which are painted white, are showing through, and I panicked that the black would look awkward against all the white. Here’s what I mocked up in Photoshop during the big panic:
See the white in the middle section of the window? This was throwing me off along with the aluminum parts of the two side windows. And I froze. I panicked. I second guessed my original vision. But then I realized the white interior doors behind the turquoise French doors at the other end of the porch do not look weird at all. And then I did more research online and I felt better about my original plan. I found a lot of windows with exterior black rims and interior white ones and they looked fine. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to doubt your vision, that’s where more circumspection comes in and that can lead to better solutions. But in this case, I want to forge ahead. If it looks bad, I can just repaint it white. But I really want the busy-ness that the white brings to fade away.
We briefly thought about taking down the middle window part and taking out the four panes of glass and replacing with one big pane, but the window is SO BIG, we wouldn’t be able to fit it into our SUV to transport it. Eventually we do want to replace the entire storm system on these windows, but in the meantime, we decide to just make it look better than it does now.
But of course, once I overcame my doubt, the weather decided not to cooperate. It’s been so humid here over the last week. I painted the door threshold four days ago and it’s still sticky to the touch. So I’m trying to wait until the humidity level is under 80%, but the clock is running out. So that should be interesting. stay tuned.
Anyhoo, moving on! Aside from the ferns going up, all the other plants went into containers, and the porch already looks so lush. Along with that development, the front railings also came down, and I can’t believe how much bigger the porch looks now. Take a gander:
And here’s some more pretty flowers:
I’m out! See you next week!
