I hope everyone is enjoying the summer! After a spring filled with opposite extremes here in Denver - gorgeous blue skies and warm weather one day, snow the next - we finally found time in late May, right before baby Cooper arrived, to do a bit of sprucing up on our front porch.
While there is never a shortage of color inside my house - our front porch has been lacking color ever since we moved in. I love the stone on our house, but the beige and grey tones of the stone, combined with the grey concrete of the front steps, made for a pretty bland and boring entrance to our home.
Here's what a front porch looked like in the late spring...
Viewed from the street, our porch has been pretty blah, but up close there were a few real eye sores. Our door mats that had once featured vibrant teal and blue stripes had become faded and worn. And while I love having our milk delivered by Royal Crest Dairy each week, the off-white milk box sitting below our mailbox certainly wasn't the most attractive element of our porch.
Additionally, the front porch wasn't serving all of the necessary purposes. We were constantly hearing from people (in particular, the all important Chinese food delivery man) that our house numbers were hard to read from the street, and that our doorbell was nearly impossible to find.
I have long term plans to replace our house numbers with something totally different. We'd really like to install back lit numbers. But since that was a bigger project than we were ready to tackle just yet, I started considering short-term solutions to the house number problem, and the answer I arrived at was paint - bright teal acrylic paint!
I also had plans to paint the doorbell button, but was originally planning something a bit more subtle. I thought that by painting the doorbell button grey, it would be easier to spot. But I quickly discovered that the grey paint did little to make the doorbell visible.
So once again I decided to go bold and painted the doorbell button the same color of teal as the house numbers.
The teal doorbell button is much easier to spot among the sea of stone.
Next I needed to replace the sad, sorry looking doormats and I wanted something to add another pop of color to the porch. As usual, my favorite store - Target - delivered just wanted I was looking for. I picked up two doormats with teal stripes. Best of all, the doormats feature Beckett's current favorite word - "HELLO!"
The text on the doormats inspired a couple of other fun additions to the front porch. I used my Cricut cutter and teal adhesive vinyl add the word MAIL to the black mailbox.
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The final challenge was to improve the look of the boring beige milkbox. A can of black spray paint and more teal adhesive vinyl letters and the milkbox went from drab to fab!
Now both the mailbox and the milkbox are so much more cheerful and well coordinated!
Some bright pink flowers and blue-green spikey grasses in the planter boxes add the final pops of color.
I would still like to add some flower pots to the porch, and I'm toying with the idea of adding color to the front doors, but for now these quick pops of color go a long ways to livening up the space!
It's amazing what a little paint, some adhesive vinyl, and a couple of hours can do!
Labels: Cricut, outdoors, painting, porch, vinyl letters
