Our Budget-friendly Porch Makeover

Here’s a fun fact: Alex hates plants. We don’t have those cute fiddle leaf figs in the empty corners of our home, no rooms are warmed up with greenery, nothing. He says plants belong outside, and to his credit, I’m not sure I could keep them alive anyway, but I’m damn well gonna try after this porch makeover.

They’ll live on pure spite because I kind of accidentally give-a-mouse-a-cookie’d our front porch and escalated into a full blown budget makeover recently and dead plants would really mess with that vibe.

To back up, some awesome friends of ours who live nearby found a porch swing just sitting out on the curb in our neighborhood and carried it alllll the way to our house because they knew we wanted one. This is what started it all.

Here’s a ‘before’ view:

To hang a porch swing, you’ve got to find the ceiling joists which are like studs but they run along your ceiling and provide a lot of support (read: you don’t want to just hang your porch swing anywhere or it’ll fall down like when you try to hang a shelf without a stud or wall anchor).

Anyway, we were having trouble finding the ceiling joists to hang the porch swing so I took down a piece of the vinyl soffit to take a look at what was underneath and found pretty old wood panels. It A) explained why we had such trouble with the stud finder, and B) OBVIOUSLY HAD TO BE EXPOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.

So I spent the next hour of baby nap time ripping down the filthy strips of soffit, getting covered in paint chips and worrying that the peeling pink paint underneath was lead. Once it was all off, we grabbed a couple of lead paint kits to make sure it wasn’t lead paint before we started scraping and sanding it all down.

Luckily it wasn’t, so Alex spent a whole morning with his paint scraper and the sander doing his best to bring that ceiling back to life.

We went back and forth on Instagram debating which color we should choose to freshen up the ceiling and even though I loved the idea of a pop of color (like the haint blue that literally hundreds of people suggested), I knew that black would be more cohesive with the rest of our home. Plus, I already had some black exterior paint leftover from another project which made it my favorite price: free.

The cracks proved time consuming to paint because I needed to do them all with a brush then roll over the whole thing for two coats, but it was totally worth it because the difference is amazing.

Oh, and in between all that, we finally found the ceiling joists by just drilling a whole bunch of pilot holes until we felt the stud (which you’ll be able to tell because there will be resistance on the drill the whole way in). We used this porch swing hanging kit from Amazon that was really easy and even came with a drilling template.

We still need to replace the fan because its rusty old blades stand out so much more now, but once the porch swing was up, my new outdoor rug was in place, and I rearranged some throw pillows and other decor from out there, it became the perfect place to relax and incessantly water my ferns.

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