It’s May 2020, we’re in week 6 of the Lockdown, I decided I know I will redecorate the porch! Afterall, what else is there to do in the year that the world stayed home.

ADHD takes over

last week I decided to ‘just paint’ the door frames so they were white again (the paint the old owners had used had turned yellow) well it was a disaster the gloss was awful. a week later and it still wasn’t fully dry. So I decided as I was needing to sand the door frames hadn’t we might as well to do the bannisters and spindles too? followed by… well might as well prime the mahogany door as well.

but hang on… if I am priming the dark wood door, I might as well make all the doors match. So from just re glossing 2 door frames to ‘just’ painting the hall. Has lead to I want to repaint the porch!

So off we go to B&Q to play a game of Pacman! except instead of grabbing fruit it was paint, sanding paper, primer and gloss we were after.

So we now have our swag, Duncan looks worried as his listens to my master plan to completely repaint the whole house! He looked even more worried as the weeks went past especially when we hit the living room with a chisel and hammer! ha ha ha

2020 home improvements the porch

So we started with the sanding. The door frames were rather easy compared to the bannisters and spindles. We soon realised weren’t just varnished but also at some point a previous owner had attempted to stain a couple of them. They clearly didn’t like the effect and abandoned staining all of them. However, this did mean we had to sand a few more than the other.

I love the end result! We are lucky that who ever installed the bannisters and spindles paid out for the more expensive oak rather than Pine. Not only does the end result feel amazing it looks amazing too.

Unfortunately, whoever did get that stain out. Didn’t decide to stop staining until they had already heavily stained the Newel post. We tried and tried however we are left with no choice but paint that.

  • First one done!
  • Slowly getting there
  • Nearly finished the all
  • primer going on.

Once we had finished the stairs we started taking down the doors to sand them. We then managed to get cleared up from the sanding before dinner on the second day of sanding.

From sanding to cleaning!

We turned our minds to the Porch. I decided I liked the blue and white in the porch and decided to incorporate it into the downstairs Hall. The Girls and I spoke long and hard about what we planned for each area and communal room downstairs.

Eventually I want it to be Forest and woodland animal themed. However the kids still make quite a bit of mess so I wanted something easy to clean and keep up. I love Dulux paint it has NEVER let me down unlike other paints. so all paints mentioned will be Dulux unless otherwise stated.

So for the Hall and porch, I knew it needed to be able to cope with damp so I went for Bathroom paint for the porch. Bathroom paint is also more wipeable than other paints. We went with the colour blue babe.

I brought 1 2.5L which did all the blue coloured paint you will see in my house, the porch, the doors and we still have half a can left for touch ups.

Due to the nature of being an unheated porch, We undercoated the whole room with mould repellent paint.

  • Porch before new furniture
  • porch before new furniture
  • Doors painted to bring the blue into the hall
  • The girls and I chose a design that highlighted the detail on the doors
  • Close up on the detailing around the glass
  • close up of the detailing of the bottom of the door

We had great fun and we all learned a lot of new skills.

  • Cutting in
  • Different grades of Sand paper
  • Preparing the different surfaces for painting
  • Working out how much paint we need
  • Looking at the different types of paint
  • Different brushes for different paints

If you are interested in following our home improvements then you can follow them here.

We are now on social media to so follow us on Facebook or Instagram