Porch Restoration Part 2: DONE!

The porch is finally done!  It's taken a few weeks for the finishing touches, but we finally made it.  Of our Porch Paint Possibilities, option #4 was the winner (but with a few tweaks).  We ended up painting the floor of the porch black rather than light gray.  Keeping it gray just made for too many contrasting elements.

We also ended up with a bit more yellow compared to any of our concept schemes.  We struggled with this.  We kept going back and forth on the whole black and yellow thing (all the while having this song stuck in our head).  Would it make the house look like the home of the city's biggest Hamilton Tiger-Cat fans?  Or like some sort of Victorian haunted house.  Hmmmm, what to do.  In the end we went for it....but not without toning down our Stuart Gold by mixing in some of the Sandy Hook Gray. 

I can't tell you how happy I am with how it all turned out - especially the front door!  It's hard to believe we left this incredible wood door concealed behind an ugly brown screen door for so long:

Porch Restoration Part 1: wash, strip, sand, fill, repeat

Finally...FINALLY, we got to work on restoring our porch this weekend.  Remember all those Porch Paint Possibilities?  Well, we chose one...sort of (more on that later) and with the perfect collision of gorgeous weather and a long weekend, we (nearly) finished returning our 120 year old Victorian porch to a more dignified state.

And remember when I said the work needed on the porch was mostly cosmetic?  Ha!  Not quite.  It took a full day and a half of washing, stripping, sanding, and wood filling before we even started painting.  I suppose that's not so bad in the grand scheme of things...but man, it was so tempting to just start slathering on shiny new paint.

After a light power washing, it was time to scrape.  Thankfully we bought a '14 in 1 Universal Tool for Painting and Projects'.

I'm not entirely sure of the other 13 things this tool does, but as far as scrapy things go, this tool was among the scrapiest.  After a good 6 hour scrape-down, it was time to bring out the big guns:

What?  Your drill doesn't come with a medieval torture device attachment?  Upon closer inspection, it turns out that this is actually an 'Original Easy Stripper'. (as seen on TV, so it must be good, right?)

I was hesitant to go at it with my easy stripper (as one should be), but somehow, the easy stripper doesn't damage wood, even 120 year old wood.  Just look at this before and after of one particularly nasty section of wood soffit:

Yeehaw I said.  Yeehaw indeed.  Now some of that paint just wasn't coming off.  I'm sure we could have gone out and bought some toxic paint eating chemical...but that's just not our thing.  Instead we accepted imperfection, and cleaned up the worst of the 'topography' with some 'Dap Drydex Spackling'.  It goes on pink and dries white!

Thankfully, this stuff dries fast.  So after some serious sanding (followed by some serious damp mopping), we were ready to paint!

Oh, and I almost forgot, check out our ugly mailbox and the amazingness we discovered behind it:

Needless to say, we decided not to put our mailbox back up, opting to stick with this original mail slot.

Now I know, if you've read this far, you must be patiently awaiting some sort of reveal of the finished product.  Well, as I mentioned, we're not quite done.  After 50 man hours (I mean person hours), we still have to put a second coat on the base of the porch, paint the actual porch floor, and touch up some of the details.  We'll get there soon.  In the meantime, to quench your curiosity, here's a sneak peak:

Porch Paint Possibilities

Spring is here and we're itching to get working on the outside of our house again.  At the top of our list is painting our porch and gingerbread-filled gable.  The porch just needs some good sanding and re-painting.  The gable on the other hand looks like it has been neglected for far too long and will need a little more than just cosmetics...we'll be calling in a professional to help us keep this heritage feature in tact.

In the meantime, we are deciding on a colour scheme.  We want to be sure of our choice before buying up gallons of paint and spending hours painting, so we did 5 photoshop mock-ups.  We'd love your feedback to help us decide!

A couple things to keep in mind though....

• the roof currently has green asphalt shingles (visible here)....we don't plan to keep them forever, but they were put on by the previous owner just before we bought the house, so they'll likely stay for a number of years before we replace them with something more neutral
• the front of our house faces north, that means it is never in direct sunlight and is pretty shady
• we plan to ditch the brown storm door that's covering the beautiful wooden front door

So there ya have it!  5 schemes.  Which one is your favourite?  For reference, here is what the house looks like today:

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-Kyle