A New Coat of Paint for the Porch

It is the beginning of June and here in North Dakota it feels more like April.  I figured that the first post this summer would be about gardening but the weather has not been cooperative.  So instead I am posting on the start of my porch makeover project.  The school year at the school that I teach at ended on May 24th and I jumped on this project as soon as my free time started.  Eventually we will get some nice summery weather here in North Dakota and then I will want the porch to be done so that I can spend the rest of the summer there reading on my Kindle :)  I am excited for my little summer reading retreat to be finished and I am off to a great start.

Here is a reminder of what we started with:

 
Those valences came down right after we moved in.  I have also been itching to pull up that ugly carpet for almost a year now.  So one warm May day I grabbed a corner that was coming up and started to pull.  The carpet was only held down by adhesive so it was a pretty quick and easy task.

Underneath the carpet was a very dirty porch floor that had several layers of paint on it.  Originally the plan was to paint some sort of pattern on the floor but I actually decided to go with one color and then paint an outdoor rug.  Look for that project in a future post.

I was originally going to give the walls and windows a fresh coat of white but I decided to go with a warm off white for the walls instead and I love it.  The color is Behr Clean Linen.

Then, after scrubbing all the dirt off of the windows, I put a fresh coat of Behr Ultra White on the windows.  I don't normally do a lot of taping but I wasn't confident in my ability to not get paint on the glass.

After painting the windows, I scrubbed the floor like crazy.  The adhesive was particularly difficult to remove but my handy paint scraper helped with that.  Then I painted the floor with Behr Porch and Floor Paint in Silver Gray.  I opted for the low luster variety instead of the high gloss.  It took two coats and I did not prime.  

The porch looks awesome now.  It is amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do.  

You can see my tomato and pepper plants in the first picture.  I have been working on hardening them off but the weather had been too rainy and cold to plant them outside yet.

The painting that I have left is the door frame.  I really want it to be white since the wood is so dark that it does not match the door at all.  I will need to prime with a couple of coats first so I am waiting a while on that.

Next up on the to-do list for this porch project is a little Ikea hack for some window seating.  I can't wait to share that project with you guys!