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:

It took forever to find the runner that goes up the front steps to the door.  We tried small carpet specialty shops, chain stores, and big box stores.  Those that actually carried outdoor runners only had very ugly and patterned options that ran between $6 and $7 / linear foot (which would add up quickly).

We eventually found exactly what we were looking for at Rona: a natural woven coco fibre runner.  The best part?  It was only $2 / linear foot!

And even though it was very tedious painting out the lacy woodwork detail above the door with the Stuart Gold, I'm so glad we did.  Before it was unnoticeable.  Now it stands out as a great original feature.  Speaking of original features, here's how we painted out that mail slot that we discovered underneath our mailbox:

It certainly was A LOT of work...but it makes a huge difference to the whole look of the house.

Now that we're finally done the porch...it's on to our gingerbread-filled gable.  Work on this is already well underway - last Saturday a friend of ours who happens to be a carpenter came over and disassembled the entire gable so he can restore it piece by piece in his shop.  Once it's back up, the front of our house will finally be done (aside from landscaping...)