Curb Appeal

When we bought our house 4 years ago, it had nice, mature landscaping so I've always thought our house has pretty good curb appeal. That is, everything except the front porch! (well really it's a front stoop I guess because it's smaller than a porch) Anyway, when we moved in, and for about 3 years, our little front stoop was covered in green outdoor carpet. You know, that looks like turf. Yeah, I can definitely say it was not my favorite! You can barely see it in this photo but it was covering the stoop and both steps.

 

Well, this past fall I decided I had had enough of the green stuff. Plus, it was getting some tears in it because Dodger, my baby, could be a little rough on it when we're playing fetch. I couldn't possibly get mad at this face though :)

 

So back to my project- I thought I'd just rip up the old carpet, maybe sand the surface a little, and then paint the concrete, all in an afternoon's work. Negative. I did rip it off in just a few minutes but was left with all of the adhesive and chipping paint from when it used to be a rose/ red-ish color?! I quickly discovered this would not be a 1 afternoon job!

I had heard that fabric softener is good at removing adhesive so I tried this first. It worked ok, but there were several places that the adhesive just wasn't coming off. So of to Home Depot I went! I got some chemical remover that's for adhesive and a scraper. I think I worked on this for about 3 days, scraping the porch every morning before I went to work. I never thought I would finish! 

Once I got all of the adhesive and chipped paint off and had a smooth surface, I rolled on a primer made just for concrete. Then I painted it black with Behr porch/ floor paint from HD. Sorry for the lack of in-progress picture but here is the after.

It looks SOOO much better than the green carpet, don't ya think?! 

Well fast forward several months to this past weekend. I finally got Matthew to replace the outdoor light. Here is the old, dirty one that had probably been here since the house was built in the 50s.

 

Yeah, it was pretty gross! Here's the new one, that we bought here, after Matthew wired/ hung it.

So I thought this was a definite improvement for the little stoop! Here are some other accessories we've added: 

A little front door bling

Now complete with flowers, flag, and fern. Wow, say that 5 times fast!

Now the only problem is that I've had this fern hanging for less than a week and already found this:

Every time I hang a fern or flowers out here, some little bird decides it's the perfect place for it's nest! So I'm waiting on these little guys to hatch and fly away and am hoping the fern doesn't die in the meantime...