I spent my weekend working on the porch, working toward the end goal of staining the porch boards with pine tar. I didn’t quite make it to the final destination but my porch looks so good!! After my weekend projects everything looks so fresh and new and clean and it has breathed new life into this porch. It will be so exciting when I finally get to the final step of staining the porch boards, but on this particular project I really enjoyed the process from start to finish. I don’t always enjoy the process of my projects, but I just know that the big payoff in the end will be worth it. But with this project, the process was really fun and rewarding at every step.
Anyway, when I left you on Friday I had already gotten this far, but I was having trouble getting the last piece of old, rotted fascia off the side of the porch.
I’m happy to report that I finally managed to get this piece off without destroying anything I didn’t want to destroy and now the entire porch has new, freshly painted PVC plank boards that will never rot.
I had already had the columns repaired and painted, and then when I had the new fascia boards installed and painted, I stood back to look at the progress and noticed that all the other trim that was painted white on the porch looked so dirty and dingy compared to the freshly painted columns and trim. I’m not sure if you can tell from the photo below, but the trim around the porch roof, window trim, and door trim almost looked like they were a different white than the columns.
Of course some of it was just dirt and grime, but even after I cleaned those areas they still looked like a different color. Here’s a wider look at the freshly painted columns compared to the remaining white areas around the porch roof. They just looked completely different colors.
Obviously that wouldn’t work. When I finish renovating the porch, it will be the first time the porch has been completely finished since we’ve lived in this house, porch baseboards and everything. That’s why I want everything to look fresh, clean and new. Although I really wanted to start staining the porch, I decided to take my time and do this project properly and thoroughly. So I spent most of my Saturday painting the rest of the white trim on the porch, including all the trim around the roof, all the trim around the porch ceiling, the window moldings, the door moldings, and the rest of the white trim on the front steps.
I’m so glad I took the time to do this because it made such a big difference. Now everything looks the same color instead of looking like two different white colors were used on the porch.
I also had to go back and redo the lower trim around the porch. This was previously painted white, and I decided I wanted to paint it the same Sherwin Williams Agreeable Gray as the rest of the house. But when I painted that trim with a new can of paint, it was much cooler than the rest of the house. I don’t know if you can tell from the picture below, but the new color looked like it had a blue undertone compared to the color that had been here for several years.
It is true that some of this paint is dirt on top of the older paint. But even after cleaning an area, the new color still had a very noticeable blue undertone compared to the old color. To balance out this blue undertone, I dug into my paint stash and found a brown color that I had used on the striped studio bathroom wall and mixed it little by little until the new color matched the old color. Since I wanted to balance out blue undertones, I needed something on the opposite side of the color wheel, namely orange. But it had to be dark rather than light, and shades of brown are in that orange family. Below you can see the newly mixed color compared to the old color (on the cleaned area between the two white lines). There is still no perfect fit, but it’s much better.
And now I need to clean the rest of the porch trim so it’s all the same color. And of course that has to be done before I can stain the porch boards. And even though the window trim has a fresh coat of white paint, the windows are dirty so I want to clean them too before staining the porch.
It’s been years since I’ve pressure washed, cleaned, or painted this porch. But just to remind you how dirty everything has gotten (thanks in large part to our humid weather here in Central Texas), I’d like to take you back to this picture I shared a few days ago of Tiger on the front steps. That’s just…gross.
But here it is now, after some pressure washing, fresh caulk and new paint.
I just love my porch again, and it’s not even finished yet! It started out looking so old and neglected but now it looks brand new again.
What I noticed is that I don’t think I ever painted the risers on the front steps when I built these steps a few years ago. After pressure washing everything, I noticed how grubby these risers still looked. There is no sign that I ever painted them. I think at the time I thought I wouldn’t have to paint the bright white PVC panels because I used them. But pressure washing did little to restore them to their original bright white color…
But now they’re painted to match everything else.
So even though I haven’t gotten to the coloring project yet, I’ve gotten a lot of work done! I think I’ve painted everything now and just need to do a little cleaning and then I can finish the porch boards.
But before I do that, I had to fill the screw holes with some wood again.
So that’s the progress on the porch after this weekend. I’m so close to the end of this porch project!
