Porch Remodeling

After I was tired of yard work (which I didn't complete fully). I decided to take on my porch. We have this great three season room but unfortunately it started being used as the extra room where we dump stuff that we don't know where to keep and don't wanna keep in the basement. Like our cooler or the old fan, car seats.. yes car seats... !!

Below are a few pictures of how are porch used to look.


Trust me this is no exaggeration.. its not like its cluttered because Paul is working there. It used to be that bad. I had cleaned it up several times and it looked ok, but never good enough.


As you can see there is a whole array of furniture there... wicker (some of which I bought at Craig list and other brand new at Home Depot); Chairs from our inherited dining chair set; some other random chairs. To top it, I got these really cute hot pink cushion covers from India for my in-laws; which got rejected.. so I exchanged the ones that i got for myself the year before (brown in color.. i guess more suited for them). They work great in this porch I think because they give a nice contrast to the greenery. And then I had got cushions for my wicker which are country style.. so really was a hodge-podge :).

So the first thing to do was get rid of those ugly blue blinds and put some nice drapes. I knew I wanted sheers but the challenge was the color. The problem was that with all the various hot-pink, green, brown, yellow, I had to get something that will compliment everything. And there is this chance of me inheriting black wicker furniture so I had to think ahead. First I got green-white drapes, gawd they looked hideous and nothing like what the JCPenny catalog showed; and green not sure what i was thinking.. i forgot about all the natural green around the porch :-s. So then after some thinking I decided to go with gold sheers and volla they worked. My windows are 64 inches long, so i got the sheers that are 63 inches long and figured it will work. I forgot about the 6 inches that go above the window as they need to be hanged on a wire/rod. But it didn't look that bad until I came accorss these cute crushed sheers at Christmas Tree shops at 2/3rd the price. And these new gold sheers were not plain sheers but had a little pattern so that waas nice. So I went from $150 green sheers to finally $50 gold sheers from Christmas Tree Shop :D. Below is the newly redecorated porch. It looks prettier at night in the yellow light.



After the drapes were decided on, the next challenge was what to hang them on as all the porch is made of metal and putting rods would be very tough and not exactly what I had in mind. So I decided to go with curtain wire. Paul helped me put the wire (in the picture above) and I put the curtains up. Bought some accessories, a nice bamboo rug - that compliments the drapes and finally was able to my marble plates I got from Agra.



A few trips to the mall and 2 weeks later the porch is ready for entertaining !! :)