Front Porch Before and Progress

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In the past couple weeks, I have been working on repairing and painting our porch furniture and styling our porch as an outdoor living room we can enjoy. It came out exactly as I had hoped and I can’t wait to share the after photos with you!

But first, I need to go back to the beginning.

This is how our porch looked when we bought the house. Rotten floor, rotten steps, and rotten railings.

It was bad, right? We had the floor and steps replaced and the railings reinstalled — there were still so many flaws but we did the best we could on a limited budget and time crunch at that moment.

Last year, we worked on repairing rotten sections of the porch with Abatron Wood Restoration Kit. This was my first time using the product and I was so impressed by how it could rebuild and strengthen sections that were very deteriorated. We also cut out new wood blocks for the bases of the spindles and new wood pieces to form the asterisk design below the porch. Steve boxed in the sides of the steps to match the other steps to our side porch. I painted the railing and columns in Sherwin Williams Alabaster and the floor in Sherwin Williams Brainstorm Bronze.

Here are some before-and-afters of different sections of the porch.

We also created landscaping beds around the porch where it had just been barren, patchy ground before. We put in hydrangeas and boxwood.

Sections of the porch still need wood repair, a couple spindle and railing areas that I worked on last year failed due to user error (my first time using the product, remember), and a few spots on the upper section of the porch we didn’t get to last year. The porch also likely needs a new roof. These are all projects for another time, but this year we wanted to make the porch comfortable and usable for the summer months.Here is our wicker porch furniture on our porch right after we moved in.

I found this furniture on Facebook Marketplace, being sold by a home relocation service for an elderly couple. The set included this couch, loveseat, chair, and coffee table as well as three side tables, a chaise lounge, a dining table, and four chairs, all in pink. The cushions were done in a 1980s fabric and had been ruined by the sun and were falling apart. I knew I’d want to makeover the set eventually, but painting wicker and making cushions is a big undertaking so I didn’t get to it for 3 years.

Fast forward to this year, and I pulled the pieces designated for the porch out of the barn where they had been stored to give them a glow up. I found that there were broken pieces of rattan on the seat portion of the couch and loveseat. I repaired those with wooden dowels, cleaned the set thoroughly, primed it with spray can primer (12 cans gave it all a very light coat), and used my brother’s spray gun to paint the topcoat in the color Tarrytown Green by Benjamin Moore.

I wanted to cushions to be ultra-fluffy pillow-style cushions that you’d want to sink in to, to contrast with the more tailored shape of the wicker itself and to make the whole area inviting for us and our guests. I used this fabric from Walmart for the cushion covers and this nylon fabric from Joann’s for the inner cushion liner. I stuffed the cushions with regular Poly-Fil. I believe it took 25 pounds. I used this continuous zipper for the cushion and pillow closures.

The pillows were made from a fabric I already owned and had once planned to use for our living room (before the large Chinese screen I found changed the color scheme I had planned) – Into the Woods by P. Kaufmann.

The planters were a recent project, with the raw cedar base purchased from Lowe’s and painted in a folk art style with paint I had on hand. The topiaries are from Walmart and the wool blankets were a secondhand find a few years ago. Lanterns are from Walmart.