Screened Porch

Some Lights Came Down, Others Went Up

The return of our living room corner space is much appreciated even though it was a bit sad to take the Christmas tree down this weekend. You’ll remember that Lucy was really enjoying having an extra wicker chair at the dining room table to nap under.

 

Things are back to normal now.

Not without a little bit of a mess of course.

After all was packed away and swept up, we missed the twinkle lights so much that we decided to take the action outside –  just in time for new years.

These guys are commonly known as our Cinco de Mayo lights because that’s when they made their first appearance in the backyard of Casa de Whited. Since then they’ve been taken down due to some bad weather and broken bulbs.

But now they are back.

We basically string heavy duty wire from our house to three different trees in our backyard, via eye-bolts like these. Chad drilled holes in the trees from a ladder and screwed the bolts directly into the trees. Then we run the wire through, clamping the excess at the end of our light strands.

The lights came from Tar-jay and the have little built in clips so they attach to the wire very easily. The wire is important if you’re planning to leave your yard lights up for a few days or even longer. The wire keeps your light strands from sagging, falling, swaying, etc.

During the day the lights look a little trailer park but at night they look mucho bueno.

Like a classy trailer park.

Pleased.

Creeping Towards Cozy

Slowly but surely we’ve added a few things to our back porch to up the cozy factor around here.  We told you guys last week all about how we wanted to clean up our back porch and add some finishing touches like curtains to maximize the rest of our Summer.  Heck, the folks at Curtainworks even pitched in and gave us the curtain rods to get started, so we had no excuses right? 

Here was our list – because we love ‘em.

1. Replace one ripped screen.
2. Clean and paint all railings a fresh coat of semi-gloss white.
3. Clean the siding, slate floors and ceiling fans.
4. Hang rods and outdoor drapes.
5. Sew slip covers for the seat cushions to make them more washable and puppy-proof.

And here it is now with a few items checked off.

1. Replace one ripped screen.
2. Clean and paint all railings a fresh coat of semi-gloss white.
3. Clean the siding, slate floors and ceiling fans.
4. Hang rods and outdoor drapes.
5. Sew slip covers for the seat cushions to make them more washable and puppy-proof.

On Friday the porch looked like this, all nekkid and curtain-less.

And here it is now, a little dressed up but not finished. WITH clean ceiling fans. I swear there were spores growing on one of them.

We’re doing our part around here to keep the drop cloth people in business, because we decided to use them to construct our porch curtains, just like we did our living room curtains and soon to be finished dining room curtains.

We know… you can say it. Enough of those things already.

We chose drop cloths again though, sans paint, because the canvas is such a nice thick material that should hold up well in the weather. Plus they aren’t too bright white to show dirt and wear which is bound to occur around our pups.  Finally they are cheap enough that if the elements were to totally destroy them we’re only out $40 for all of them.   We definitely checked out fabric stores for sales on outdoor prints, but nothing really caught our eye.

The sales price of $10 a yard would still put us a bit over budget at $120 total. Yikes – kind of cancels out those free curtain rods huh?

One thing we did learn on the drop cloths round two, is that sometimes they have weird seams sewn into them. Like something figures it doesn’ t matter because it’s just a cheap ugly drop cloth. Doesn’t the drop cloths company know there are people out there turning these things into curtains? Luckily we were able to cut the weird seams off.

The we just hemmed the top using our tried and true iron-on tape method and clipped them onto the rings we hung up at the end of last week.  We purchased the rings from Lowes for about $10 a pack which added another $30 to our mini-makeover total.

As the room comes together the plan is to add some excitement to the curtains with ribbon trim or festive tie backs. Something to take them away from boring beige.

Plus the nice and clean siding gives the outdoor room a fresh start and clean feel. We just uses a big sponge and some diluted  Mr. Clean to take care of the grime.  Three buckets of black water later and the whole wall was done. You could eat off our siding now – which would be pretty difficult due to it’s vertical nature, but you get our point. It’s pretty darn clean right now.

We traded the homemade ice cream we mentioned in a previous post here, for a bottle of wine instead. Great way to spend a Sunday evening in Durham.  What have you guys been up to since Friday?

Something’s Missing…

Consider this post Part II to our porch progress post from this morning. We figure almost 500 words was plenty to read on a Friday morning – in fact you may not even be reading this today. Happy Monday if you’re a couple of days behind and checking back in with us later. Hope you had a great weekend! While you were away we got some work done.

1. Replace one ripped screen.
2. Clean and paint all railings a fresh coat of semi-gloss white.
3. Clean the siding, slate floors and ceiling fans.
4. Hang rods and outdoor drapes.
5. Sew slip covers for the seat cushions to make them more washable and puppy-proof.

Here is how our whole back porch was looking. It is located right off of our kitchen, through the French doors just to give you a little bit of perspective.

 What is a little tough to see in this picture is the grodiness that was our porch spindles and railing. Here’s a close-up. They were looking a lot like our car port posts which we painted a couple of months ago.

Pretty gross, eh? Good thing we still had our paint from the car port and trash can-hiding fence still around. If you’re curious we used a semi-gloss Valspar exterior paint purchased at Lowes. We’ve been really happy with the thick, somewhat shiny results. Plus it has a lifetime warranty. I’m not sure what that means for paint but we expect it will wear well.

Here is the play-by-play you’ve come to expect from us by now. We’re not going to go into the how-to because we think you guys probably get how we did it.

I’m looking a little intense – got my painting face on along with my birthday Toms. What you can’t see is that I’m also wearing a tee shirt with Ron Burgundy on the back that says “You Stay Classy.” Love it.  I also had a certain someone keeping me company.

She’s a firm yet fair supervisor.

They turned out pretty good after a wipe down by Mr. Clean and a fresh coat of paint.

Note that this photo was taken much later in the evening. It took about three hours to carefully clean and paint all of the rails and 58 spindles.

The finished paint job was looking pretty good. Even still in the darker hours last night before we hung up our curtain rods. We apologize in advance for the darkness in many of the photos you’re about to see, we do a lot of our projects at night after work.

It’s a good thing we have lights on our porch fans, which by the way was the very first DIY project tackled at Casa de Whited. Drove us nuts not to have lights out there. Within days of moving in we picked two cheapo light kits up at Home Depot and installed them ourselves for about $20 each.

So with numero dos marked off our list we moved on to complete half of numero four.

1. Replace one ripped screen.
2. Clean and paint all railings a fresh coat of semi-gloss white.
3. Clean the siding, slate floors and ceiling fans.
4. Hang rods and outdoor drapes.
5. Sew slip covers for the seat cushions to make them more washable and puppy-proof.

Hanging drapery rods on our porch isn’t exactly necessary with the screens and all but we I do think they’ll look pretty. Some curtains will also definitely serve a great function in managing the sun that sometimes blinds us when sitting in the rockers at the end of the day.

Our friends at Curtainworks were awesome to hook us up with three rust-proof outdoor curtain rods to kick-start this mini-makeover.  Thanks Stephanie!

We chose black rods to complement the other outdoor fixtures of our house, we have black porch lights and shutters, but you can pick up other finishes on Curtainworks website if you’re in the market.

The mounting brackets were a little tricky at first, but once one of us drilled the right sized pilot holes we were rockin’ and rollin’ all around that porch.  A couple of screws just had to be stripped in the process. Hate when that happens.

The trick is to use a drill bit that is just smaller than your screws so that they go easily into the wood posts, but still give the screws something to attach to.  If you’re having a hard time drilling your screws in AFTER drilling pilot holes they are likely too small, try the next size up. Chad will find it amusing that I am imparting this advice after learning it myself only about 18 hours ago.

But again, once the pilot holes were drilled the right size we were in business, double-fisting our Black and Deckers all around the porch – using the corded drill that has a bit more power to drill our pilot holes and the light weight cordless drill to actually hang the brackets.

The trickier part was planning our rod arrangement. Since we had one l-o-n-g side to cover it took some fanangaling to get the rods just right and connected. Plus, because we’re going to use rings to hang our drapes (read: easy to take curtains up and down to wash) we had to go ahead and space those out and slide them on to our rods before mounting them.

The round brackets included with our rods are perfect for the outdoors because the wind cannot knock the rods down, being fully enclosed circles.  Being fully enclosed just means you have to do a little planning in your head when hanging them – which was okay, we don’t mind thinking every now and then.

Which we had to do to get our one corner just right. We basically hung one rod closer in on the wall so the rods wouldn’t touch, and left the finial off of that rod so that the rings could flow together giving the drapes a cohesive look once they’re up.

They’re looking good! Except something is of course still  missing.

But, rather than go curtain shopping at 10 PM we decided to go to bed instead. We’re stil debating our curtain choices but will definitely get something hanging this weekend. We’ve thought about standard sheers, lets some light through and not too heavy. Or maybe even drop cloths like our cheapo living room curtains, thick and sturdy, super easy to keep clean. Or what about a fun outdoor fabric for more of a statement?

As soon as we pick the curtains or fabric you guys will be the first to know, well you guys and probably the next door neighbors whose windows look out directly into our porch.

In the meantime go check out Curtainworks website, especially if you’re looking for some great sturdy outdoor curtain rods. Ours were pretty money and we’re not just saying that because they didn’t cost us any.

Walkin’ On Sunshine

Durham’s weekend weather forecast is looking good. So good that we can’t even describe it in words, we just have to show you.

Much improved from the rained out baseball  game of last weekend and the monsoon of the holiday weekend.

On one hand we are insane, because the first thing we thought of was how clean we could get our gutters with this kind of weather on the way.

But secondly, and really more importantly, is the fact that this is the absolute perfect weekend to clock some hours relaxing on our screened in back porch. A couple of people, a couple of pups, and a couple of bowls of homemade ice cream… see where we are going with this?

The goal of relaxing doesn’t mean that we’re not going to gussy her up a bit still – you know us better than that by now.   While we still have dreams of something cozy yet slightly dramatical, like these images posted last week, we’ve also got a short term to-do list that’s much more practical and much less Flavor Flav. Did you catch the reference?

The hubs made great head way last week, pretty much transforming the function of the space just by rearranging furniture, read a little more about all that here.  We spent zero dollars and felt like we had an extra room to our house added on.

Extra points in that he even scrounged up an old rug to use under our new outdoor coffee table. AND he even washed it last weekend,  AND a lizard got in the washing machine AND it survived the wash cycle AND no we didn’t kill it when we found it. We released it into the front yard, unfortunately after accidentally de-tailing him. He didnt’ seem to mind though he was just happy we found him before tossing the rug into the dryer.

Whew. Still with me?

So here’s the list of those little things that we would like to get done sooner rather than later in this little outdoor corner of the casa.

1. Replace one ripped screen.
2. Clean and paint all railings a fresh coat of semi-gloss white.
3. Clean the siding, slate floors and ceiling fans.
4. Hang rods and outdoor drapes.
5. Sew slipcovers for the seat cushions to make them more washable and puppy-proof.

This list doesn’t bring us to Donesville but it is short, realistic and makes the room a little more functional. After these few things are done we can focus on fun additions like flowers, pillows, accessories, even local folk art (maybe?) on an as-we-go basis. We may not come out looking like a high-end mountain top resort but we will feel more at home outside our home for sure.

Psst: Number 2 and half of number 4 have been scratched off the list since we started writing this post. Shazamm!  We’ll get all that up for you guys to see this afternoon.

Step One: We Can Have Lots of Fun

Don’t you guys remember that song? Are we Am I the only NKOTB fan out there? I think I stared at Joey McIntyre and his topless hat on my bedroom wall for at least two years of my childhood.

 

Now, for the past two years, I’ve been staring at our screened in back porch trying to figure out how to best maximize the space. Being completely honest here, these were the true “before” photos. A cluttered, messy space mostly inhabited by the pups on lazy afternoons. You’ll remember from this post, that Lucy spends a lot of time standing on the grill.

The wooden Adirondack love seat and coffee table are the new addition and were purchased from World Market over the Fourth of July weekend for… wait for it… $44.99 for the loveseat and $18.00 for the table. We couldn’t believe it. The loveseat was marked down 75%, originally selling for $179.99.

We scooped it up on the pronto, after disassembling it in the World Market parking lot. We had to buy the floor model because at such a great price that was all they had left by the time we arrived and it wouldn’t fit in the Jeep as is. I literally sat on it until the salesperson wrote up a sold sign to tape to it while we kept shopping – in order to physically prevent anyone from actually buying it out from under us. Once said sold sign was in place I think I skipped all around the store at least twice until Chad told me people were staring.

As much as we love it, our back porch is w-a-a-y over cluttered and not really functional at this stage of photographs. You can see we have a big plastic storage box in the corner keeping our french door from opening all the way. We also have Lucy’s perch in the other corner, also known as the grill. Add in some dog beds, a couple of rocking chairs and a table and chairs and it’s less than organized chaos up in this piece. What’s a guy and a girl to do?

Well, in this case the girl did nada and the guy did some rearranging. This first step is our idea of fun, even more fun than the New Kids, figuring out how we use the space and adapting accordingly. Here is the first step towards a cozier back patio. By no means done, this plan just brings us into functional territory and lets us see what we already have.

Here’s what we did. First, the big plastic box got moved into the corner of the car port. Most of our small and inexpensive lawn and garden items end up being tossed into the car port somewhere rather than on the porch anyways. Think hand shovels, small bags of potting soil, bulbs to be planted garden twine, etc. Not larger, theft-worthy, items. So moving the box was pretty logical.

Secondly, because we never open left hand side of our french doors we’ve moved the small table and chairs over into that corner. It’s a bit more out-of-the-way there and now that the other door opens completely it feels less cramped than before. This could be completely temporary though. We’re going to eat a few dinners on the porch this week to figure out what we like best, casually lounging on the loveseat or sitting at the table. The table may a Craigslist post if we decide to look for more space (sorry mom! this was my first kitchen table in my first apartment about seven years ago thanks to the ‘rents).

It’s definitely a first step towards a more livable outdoor space.  The curtains are going up next so look out.

Bringing the Inside Out

Weather forecasts like this:

 

Have us wishin’ and a hopin’ for weather and a room like this:

We are fortunate to have a large screened in back porch but, after looking at these images, we apparently are not maximizing it’s potential.  We smell a quick project coming on… in fact we more than smell it.

To help kick us in the rears our friends at Curtainworks have sent us some outdoor curtain rods to get started with! Read all about our love for Curtainworks here, still can’t believe they make curtains out of old water bottles.

So stay tuned friends, we’re uploading the before shots, pulling out some paint and psyching ourselves up to begin really enjoying our outdoor space. Got to love summer.

Photos: Country Living, Decorpad, House Beautiful, Jaqlene

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