Navy Blue Sunporch Reveal

One of the most charming exterior features of our Colonial Farmhouse is the sunporch.

There’s just something about a sunporch that gives an old house some added character. It’s probably all the windows.

Here’s a refresher on what the exterior of our Colonial Farmhouse looks like with the sunporch. Ignore the landscaping for now. This is an improvement from when we moved in.

From the inside of the house, there is nothing charming about our sunporch.

Zip. Zero. Nada.

It has cracked windows. The windows that aren’t cracked look like someone let a toddler finger paint with window glazing. Some of the window grids are askew. There are rotting tongue and groove floorboards in a couple of places. There is an American flag wallpaper border and an ugly ceiling fan. The front door opens, but only partway because the floor isn’t level. Oh, and the paint is peeling in spots.

But other than that it is fine.

Hahahahaha!

Suffice to say, time has not been kind to this poor sunporch.

Do we have money budgeted for new windows and new floors? Heck no! I’m saving for a new kitchen.

The cracked window thing isn’t as bad as it sounds because there are storm windows on the outside, so it’s not like the sunporch is completely open to Mother Nature and all her critters. Although, there did seem to be a secret portal open to ladybugs during one warm week in October.

The rotten floorboards are as bad as it sounds, but it isn’t something we are motivated to fix yet. Since tongue and groove boards lock together, replacing one board in the middle of a floor is an annoying project. In the meantime, tread carefully, my friends.

My goal was to put some lipstick on this pig for around $100 and a lot of elbow grease. Basically, my budget was to be spent on paint, caulk and wood filler.

Let’s see if paint really can work miracles.

Our dirty, sad-looking sunporch is now a dramatic navy blue!

The ceiling, walls, trim, and baseboard heaters are all the same color and sheen. The floor was painted using black porch paint. The ceiling fan was also painted black.

It took me about a week of painting in all my spare time to put two coats of paint on this room. It was hours upon hours of work. The ceiling was probably the most annoying because I had to back brush in between all the grooves.

Totally worth it though!

I’m enjoying this color of navy blue paint because it changes throughout the day and with the weather. You’ll notice this change in the photos I’m sharing. I was tempted to go darker with the navy color, but this color almost looks black in certain light, so I’m glad I selected the color I did. I matched it to a color in my living room rug.

Our sunporch is about 4 1/2-feet wide and maybe 30-feet long. It has five doors. Four of the doors are french doors that are not centered on the sunporch. They are centered on the interior rooms, our living room and music room.

Needless to say, there is not a lot of useable space in this sunporch.

I did pull some furnishings from other areas in my house to give you a sense of scale in these pictures because furniture and art was not in the budget for this makeover! I’ve also since removed the vintage quilts because I don’t think direct sunlight is good for them.

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I’m not 100% certain how we are going to use this space.

In the summer this sunporch is uninhabitable. It reaches temperatures equivalent to the surface of the sun. We have to keep the doors to the sunporch closed to keep the rest of the house cool.

Now that the temperatures have cooled down, the sunporch does still warm up during the day and I can open the french doors to help naturally heat our living room and music room.

I envision this space having rocking chairs and it being a neat place to sit and read with a cup of coffee. Maybe I’ll write blog posts from the sunporch?

An odd perk of painting the sunporch dark is that when you drive by our house during the day, it is harder to see into the porch. It’s really an optical illusion because there are no window treatments. Before, you could drive by and see that American flag border in all its glory!

For anyone who thinks I’m crazy to have painted the floor black, you’re probably right. This is the second floor I’ve painted black, so I knew what I was getting into. Yes, a black floor does show dust and dirt, but I’m the weirdo who thinks that is a good thing because it is a reminder to clean.

I’d prefer the floor to be stained wood like the rest of our floors, but since it can’t be right now, the black paint ties in well with the other black accents we have in the connecting spaces.

I couldn’t fix all the problems in our sunporch with my $100 budget. Paint is good, but not that good. However, I think those flaws aren’t quite so apparent at first glance. It’s like my porch is wearing a hat to cover up a bad hair day and sunglasses to hide dark eye circles. From a distance it looks like she has it all together.

Having a room that was imperfect to begin with gave me some freedom to have fun with this space. This is how I have fun, apparently!

I feel an odd sense of self-imposed pressure to restore our Colonial Farmhouse to its former glory and to honor its heritage with my design choices. However, I also want it to be a home that reflects our family’s personality. Finding the sweet spot between those two objectives can be tricky.

If this sunporch had brand new windows, I wouldn’t have painted them blue. If this sunporch had brand new floors, I wouldn’t have painted them black. The walls and ceiling are different story though!

I’m choosing to be grateful for this in-between time because it makes me happy to open the doors to this sunporch now instead of reluctant to step foot in what started out as a depressing space. Our sunporch was a low risk way for me to flex some creative muscle. To choose a color that I might not normally pick. To not take my house or myself too seriously.

I couldn’t “ruin” anything with this makeover and that is so liberating. By also addressing some of the issues with this room, I probably did buy us some more time before we have to spend money to renovate this space. I’m a big believer in taking care of what you already own and usually when I do that it brings me a deep sense of satisfaction.

The paint color used in this navy sunporch is Glidden America’s Cup Navy 10BB 11/126 color matched to Behr Premium Plus in the satin enamel finish.

The floor was painted with Behr Low Lustre Enamel Porch Paint in black.

The navy blue outdoor dining chairs are from Target and they still look brand new after being outside all spring and summer. I featured them in this post.

The rattan swivel chair was a thrifted find and featured in this post. The pouf and white throw are from a shop in Ireland. The leather-topped stool is from HomeGoods.

*affiliate links included in this blog post*

Thanks for checking out my navy blue sunporch! Here are some other posts you might enjoy.

Step Stool (from a high school shop class) Makeover

Sweet Potato Cranberry Doughnuts

Hiding Cords Behind a Desk with a Curtain

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Music Room Before and After

I’m not sure if I’ve ever done a proper ‘before and after’ room post because that’s just not how I roll, but there’s a first time for everything!

Today I’m going to show you pictures of our music room before and after because I’m at a stopping point in this space.

Basically, I’ve called it ‘good enough’ for now. Or maybe ‘much better than before’ and I’ve moved on to other projects. Yes, there are still things to do in the music room.

Will they get done? Definitely.

Probably.

Let’s not hold our breath.

Last week I showed you my piano harp art.

The piano harp art may be the star of the show, in terms of art, in our music room, but the supporting cast is the newly clean, wallpaper-free walls.

This room was entirely wallpapered when we moved in. Even the stair risers.

The below photo shows our piano room on the day we moved in in June 2019. That’s not our stuff on the floor – it was left here.

What you can’t tell is that the walls were so dirty that I actually washed them with a floor mop. You don’t want to know about the filth that was on the baseboards and heaters.

Those french doors lead to a sunporch that is also in dire need of a makeover.

Opposite the french doors is the stair wall that goes up to the bedrooms.

As you can see, there was a lot going on in this space:

Another set of french doors that separated this room from our dining room.

Painted stripes going up the wall.

Flowered wallpaper on the stair risers.

White and blue trim.

The little flowers on the stair molding were not original. How do we know? They were hot glued in place. Handy Husband ripped those off one day with a great deal of enthusiasm.

That stair wall looked like this after I painted over the stripes and removed the wallpaper from the stair risers.

The trim got a fresh coat of paint too.

After I applied wood putty to the knots in that wood wall, sanded it, primed it and put four coats of paint on it it now looks much brighter and cleaner.

There’s a closet under those stairs. If you push on the “hidden” door it springs open. That’s where I keep my vacuum. You’re welcome for that tidbit.

I did leave one nail in that hidden door (and painted it white) so that I have the easy option of hanging something there in the future.

This is the view from the music room looking into our living room.

Those floors are original to the house.

Now let’s get back to the nitty gritty on what had to be done to fresh up this music room.

Namely, removing the decades-old wallpaper. In my experience, no wallpaper removal process is the same because there are too many variables involved.

The patterned part of the wallpaper in our music room came off in seconds. The underlayment did not want to give up the ghost.

After I finally got it all off, I had to scrub the walls to remove any remaining residue. I also patched some cracks and caulked around all the trim.

I’d like to tell you it was a good time, but it was mainly grunt work. Nothing glamorous about it.

All that grunt work was totally worth it though!

The music room wallpaper was probably the least offensive wallpaper in this house, but I didn’t realize how much better I would feel about our main living areas until it was all down and the room was painted.

Our dining room/entry, music room, and living room are all connected in a straight line, so these spaces feel more cohesive now.

I did save a section of the wallpaper to put in a file for a future homeowner. Just a little piece of this home’s history for their reference.

I have griped about the amount of stuff we hauled out of this house when we moved in.

However, it is hard to regret that situation because there were quite a few gems that we kept.

Like this radio. Isn’t it fantastic?

It works too!

The plug on the cord kind of looks like a fire waiting to happen, but don’t worry. It’s not plugged in. And since there are precious few outlets in this house, I’m not going to waste one on this thing!

We tested the radio out and it does pick up channels, but not with great clarity.

I loved how the radio looked and I think it works in our Colonial Farmhouse because we have a healthy mix of old and new decor.

I can imagine a family gathering around this radio to listen their favorite programs. Can’t you? Perhaps one of FDR’s fireside chats?

There are still a few things to do in the music room. Of course!

We need a new light fixture that we won’t bang our heads on. I need to paint the french doors that lead to our sunporch and finish painting the stair railing. The light switch and outlets need to be updated. And, I’m still contemplating art options for the stairs.

I have been asked if I am going to paint everything in this house white. The answer is it is quite possible!

What I’m really doing is cleansing the palate, so to speak. This house was so busy and so dirty when we moved in. It had been neglected for a long time. I needed a reset button, a fresh start. White paint was and is the way for me to do that.

Also, I like white paint.

I have ideas on where I might want to add color in the future, but right now I’m happy to be enjoying the process. I really like living in this old Colonial Farmhouse. This isn’t our forever house, but it feels good to be here right now. This revelation is amusing to me because there are so many things wrong with this space. How I can swing from irritated to enamored with our house in the space of a millisecond is beyond me.

A handful of times in the last few months I have randomly mentioned to Handy Husband, “I like living here.”

He always replies in his chatty way, “Mmmhmm.”

This house is a labor of love, so sometimes we both need the reminder that being here is a good thing for our family.

However, it is no longer a hardship to sing and play the piano in our newly made-over music room.

In fact, I think I’ll go do that now.

It sure beats the alternative – stripping more wallpaper!

The wall color is Arcade White by Behr. The trim color is Bit of Sugar by Behr.

Thank you so much for sharing part of your day with me. I can’t give you a hug, but I can share these other posts you might enjoy!

Sheet Music Easter Eggs

Kitchen Refresh with Paint

Hide Furniture Scratches Without Refinishing

Colorful Girls Room

*affiliate links in this blog post*

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The Surprising Way We Cleared 75 Feet of Bushes

When we bought the Colonial Farmhouse it wasn’t visible from the road.

This is saying a lot about the amount of overgrowth happening on the front of our property because the Colonial Farmhouse sits only 20-feet from the road.

It should be visible to the naked eye.

To further illustrate how overgrown the bushes had become, we didn’t need window treatments. No one driving by at night could peer in the front windows – at least not on the main level.

I don’t even have a good picture of the overgrowth because there was nothing photogenic about the situation. Here’s this one though…

Can you see the road? Or the stone wall?

I didn’t think so.

Yes. There is a stone wall, a short one, hiding under those bushes.

The bushes had gone unchecked for so long that in some places they were 16-feet deep and at least that tall. The real problem with this scenario is that the bushes were covering an area that was probably 150-feet long.

*sigh*

Handy Husband and the kids started clearing the bushes by hand. It was a tedious job that was taking forever – even with a saw. They had made a definite dent in the project, but there was still several weekends left of work to do.

One day at breakfast, I looked out the window. Thank goodness Handy Husband had started clearing the bushes so I could see the situation unfolding on the side of the road.

There was a tractor with a mower right in front of my house!

Whose tractor was it? I didn’t care.

I did, actually.

The township was mowing the grass on the sides of the road. The tractor operator had stopped right in front of our house to put up a “mowing ahead” sign.

I don’t ever act impulsively when I’m sitting in my pajamas eating toast, but today was not a normal day and that man was almost done eating his granola bar and setting up his “mowing ahead’ sign.

I HAD to talk to him.

I ran out the front door, not even pausing to put on shoes, to flag down the tractor operator. It probably wasn’t the best way to make a first impression, but I was in full carpe diem mode.

I asked him if he was just mowing grass or if he possibly had a mower that could trim the bushes too?

I believe I said something to the effect of “if your mower accidentally fell on top of all these bushes and trimmed them a little, I wouldn’t be sad.” Just take a little off the top if you could.

He could have said no. He could have said I’m not allowed to do that.

Any of those answers would have been appropriate and would have totally made sense.

Instead, he said, “Sure! I’ll see what I can do.”

He goes on his merry way. I go back to eating my toast. Carpe diem mode is over.

Sometime later in the morning I realize the tractor operator has made his way back to our side of the road and he’s now mowing the bushes on our property.

And I do mean REALLY mowing the bushes on our property!

He went to town on those suckers!

And he wasn’t just taking a little off the top. He was mowing the bushes DOWN TO THE GROUND.

That thing was shredding the bushes into teeny tiny bits of sawdust. There were no limbs. No leaves. Nothing. That mower was obliterating the bushes.

Of course, his mower is probably 5-feet wide and as you can see there IS a stone wall, so he could only mow what he could reach, which is fine. He had given us a huge leg up in removing the bushes and I was elated.

When he got to the end of our property and moved on, I thought he was done.

For reference, I took the below photo when the tractor operator started mowing the bushes. All the parts where there is bare dirt – that is the area Handy Husband had already cleared. You can’t see the 75-feet or more of additional bushes. They just kept going and going.

Since I thought the tractor operator was done and had moved past our property, we left for the afternoon.

So imagine my surprise when I came home to see this…

That’s my house!

I’ve never seen it from that angle!

I was SHOCKED to realize that all of the bushes were now gone. All of them. The tractor operator had come back, driven around our stone wall and mowed the rest of the bushes. All the ones he couldn’t reach on the first pass.

I was shocked. Flabbergasted. Floored. I think my mouth was actually hanging open in surprise.

There was hardly anything to even clean up. No limbs to haul away. Very little debris remained. That’s how good that mower was.

A couple minutes of his time saved Handy Husband days upon days of hard, manual labor. Plus, it was free!

The only thing I knew to do at that point was to ~~pick my jaw up off the ground~~ warn Handy Husband that our property might look a little different when he came home from work. Just a tad.

Then I called the township to thank them profusely for the sheer kindness of their employee. He went above and beyond the call of duty to help us out and I am forever grateful.

Since that time, we have had people stop their cars to tell us how much better the property looks. And it does. I’m so happy the house can be seen from the road now because it makes such a statement.

Speaking of statements, you can also see in our windows now…so I might need to do something about that.

We still have to deal with some roots and make sure that the bushes don’t grow back before we can try planting grass, but that’s part of the process.

Here’s the bottomline. I’m so glad I asked for help. We aren’t the people who normally ask for help because we are capable and we don’t want to take advantage of others. However, those bushes were a burden. At least, that’s how the task of removing them felt.

What a gift it was for someone to ease that burden.

P.S. I’m not a complete slacker around here. I was not helping with this project because there was a lot of poison ivy hiding in the bushes. I never thought I was allergic to poison ivy, but apparently I am now! Lucky me.

P.P.S. The green can that is randomly sitting in the grass in all of those pictures is actually covering our well head. I haven’t decided what to do about that, so the can remains on guard duty to protect the well head from the lawn mower.

Here are some other posts you might enjoy!

Zucchini Cornbread

Halloween Countdown Lunchbox Notes – Free printable

Living in Ireland: Spring Flowers in Our Yard

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The 1971 MLS Listing For Our Colonial Farmhouse

I rarely answer my phone for numbers I don’t recognize.

Half the time I don’t answer my phone for numbers I DO recognize.

Therefore, it must have been fate calling one sweltering summer night when my phone rang and I decided to answer. After all, every once in awhile I do need to make sure I remember how.

The person who sold us our home was on the other end of the line.

He had found the 1971 MLS Listing for our Colonial Farmhouse in some papers he was sorting through and called to see if I wanted it.

Do I need air to breathe?

Do I need shoes that are cute AND comfortable?

Do I need my children to put their cereal bowls in the dishwasher instead of on the counter next to the dishwasher?

YES!

I definitely want the 1971 MLS Listing for our Colonial Farmhouse. Yes, yes, yes!

And how fast can I get my hands on it?

Frankly, I didn’t know the MLS existed in 1971. I wasn’t alive then.

It didn’t even occur to me to wonder how houses were advertised for sale at any point before we bought our first house in the early 2000s.

Now that I’ve had some time to mull it over, I’m assuming it would involve newspapers, signs and direct mail.

The internet sure has changed things, hasn’t it?

But, man oh man, am I glad he kept that piece of paper and offered it up to me! That was genuinely kind.

For the purposes of sharing this information with the entirety of the internet, I have blurred out some identifying details related to our home’s location. If you want to creep on me, you’re going to have to put some effort into it. But, please don’t. We aren’t that interesting.

This 1971 MLS Listing cleared up some questions about our Colonial Farmhouse and introduced others.

First, other than switching out some outlets, we have not opened up any walls in this house. We are not emotionally prepared for the mess that we ~~definitely will~~ might find!

We were fairly certain that the Colonial Farmhouse’s wiring was not original, but this 1971 MLS Listing confirms that the wiring was updated. That doesn’t mean that the “new” wiring doesn’t need to be updated again (it does), but it is better than having original knob and tube wiring. Knob and tube wiring was pretty common in the U.S. between the 1880s and 1940s and our home is a lot older than that.

Second, we do not own 2.85 acres and the seller did not buy 2.85 acres in 1971. I asked! We think this was a typo or a math mistake because we have a fairly recent plat map with the dimensions of the property and the acreage comes out to just shy of 2 acres.

In the course of this conversation with the seller we did learn that the Colonial Farmhouse was purchased by a couple in the 1960s and at that time the house was sitting on 85 acres. The couple divided the property up and then re-listed the house for sale with just 2 acres of land.

Third, I was curious about property taxes because people in New Jersey like to talk about property taxes more than they do the weather. For real!

Property taxes on the Colonial Farmhouse in 1971 were $875 per year. New Jersey now has the highest property tax rates in the country, so it probably won’t surprise you to learn that the taxes on the Colonial Farmhouse have increased 700% since 1971.

I asked the seller if it was hard to watch that number leap up year after year and he said it was infuriating, but he still lived here for close to 50 years.

This 1971 MLS Listing, which is really just a battered piece of paper with the bottom fifth of the page missing, is such a treasure to me. It’s like a miniature time capsule of our home’s history.

I got to see what our house used to look like with the cedar shake siding and the wood front porch. It was almost like that feeling you get when you look back on baby pictures of your kids. So cute! And didn’t give me any sass!

I also got to see the view out the back of the house before the fir trees were planted. We are so happy with our current backyard view and the privacy it provides, but those trees ARE obscuring the view of the valley. Maybe we need to do a little trimming…

Perhaps what struck me the most after reading this 1971 MLS Listing is that the features of the Colonial Farmhouse that were deemed the most important or marketable to buyers in 1971 were still what was most important to us in 2019. The original beams, the wide plank floors, the two staircases, the view, the outbuildings, and the location. Isn’t that interesting?

Perhaps this is just a case of the right home finding the right buyers over and over, but I’d like to think that this is also a case of the staying power of historical design and classic architectural details.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a girl who appreciates all the modern conveniences that did not exist in historical homes. Some of them still don’t exist in our Colonial Farmhouse. However, I also place a high degree of value on the quality materials that were used to build colonial era homes and the workmanship that went into each home’s construction. In fact, given that this home was built before electricity and power tools were a thing, I’m downright flabbergasted.

This experience renews my conviction that while the Colonial Farmhouse does need a lot of love and updating, the more permanent design choices we make should strike a balance of reflecting our style, but be as classic and timeless as the features that attracted us to the home in the first place.

P.S. Come to find out, the idea for the first MLS system started back in the late 1800s when real estate agents needed a way to share information about homes they were trying to sell.

Thanks for sharing part of your day with me! Here are some other posts you might enjoy.

Bowling Ball Lawn Orb

3 Unexpected Succulent Planters

DIY Wood Arrow Mantel Art

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Our Colonial Farmhouse Dining Room

Today is an exciting day.

You get to see where I eat breakfast!

And lunch.

And dinner.

Sometimes a snack or…three.

That’s right, it is Colonial Farmhouse Dining Room Day.

If you are new here, two months ago we bought a really, really old house.

Old houses are quirky. Ours is no exception. This house has no formal or informal foyer space, which would drive me nuts if I didn’t have a thousand other things that were already doing that.

When you walk through the front door of our Colonial Farmhouse, you are walking into the original room of this house (circa late 1700s). The previous owners used it as a living room, but because there is no seating space in our kitchen we are using it as a dining room. And our entry. And a pass-through to all the other areas of the house.

It is a hard-working, 16’x16′ space!

This is the dining room on the day we received the keys to the Colonial Farmhouse. The picture was taken from the front door and looking to the left.

The furniture and household items you see in the above picture are a small fraction of the items left in the Colonial Farmhouse by the seller.

What you can’t see are the countless cobwebs on the beams or the balls of cat hair in every nook and cranny. What you can’t smell is that recliner. Trust me…you don’t want your nostrils to burn in that way.

There is an original fireplace in this room that works. It does have a chimney plug because the previous owners used that space to hold their tv (see their tv stand below) instead of using the fireplace to heat the house.

There were also intricate stencils on the doors next to the fireplace. It is hard to see the stencil on the right, but they are paintings of faux shelves with faux doilies, plants and bottles. I’ll bet you haven’t seen that anywhere!

Those doors open to a closet, by the way.

Since we have moved in, all I have done to this room is cleaned and painted.

And cleaned and cleaned some more.

This is what you see when you walk in now.

Original beams. Original floors. Both from the late 1700s.

And my dining table from the…early 2000s.

The walls of this room are stone and a doozy to drill through to hang a gigantic, old window.

Just ask Handy Husband.

No. Don’t. It’s too soon.

The fireplace is also original and would have been where all the cooking was done when the house was built. The fireplace has had some “updates” over the years. We are pretty sure the hearth is new…whatever “new” in a house this old means.

It’s hard, in a picture, to convey the scale of this fireplace. It. is. massive.

The brick opening is 5 feet wide. From the floor to the top of the mantel is just over 5 feet tall. Handy Husband cut the logs in the fireplace to 32 inches in length and in this picture they seem so puny!

The floor planks are roughly 12 inches wide. There are deep grooves between some of the planks, which do an awesome job of catching all the cereal my kids drop on the floor.

However, even this nuisance does not damper my love for these wood floors. They are what made me fall in love with this ~~money pit~~ Colonial Farmhouse in the first place.

Now, what I do not love about this room is the ugly 1980s ceiling fan. I wasn’t even going to show you an after picture with the fan in it, but where’s the fun in that? This is real life.

That fan is the only light in this very dark room. THE ONLY LIGHT. It’s not even centered on the room. I’m guessing it was placed there because running the electrical was hard in a house with stone walls and this was the easiest place to put a light.

There are two windows in this room, but they look out onto a covered front porch. (See that space here.) Covered porches are amazing, but they block a lot of light from entering the house.

We’ve gone around and around about what to do with the lighting situation in this dining room. We now have a running joke about installing “historically accurate recessed lights.”

Yes, we crack ourselves up over here!

Honestly though, we haven’t been in a hurry to rip that ceiling fan down because we haven’t turned it off since we moved in. It is summer and we don’t have central air-conditioning. A little air movement is necessary. But once the temperatures drop to something slightly cooler than Hades, all bets are off.

In the meantime, I am enjoying our Colonial Farmhouse dining room so dang much. It makes me happy to be in there, which is a good thing since I’m not one to skip a meal!

By no means is this dining room done. The only thing I’ve hung on the wall is that window, so there are still plenty of design elements to figure out. All in good time, my friends. All in good time.

Room Details

Table and chairs are 15 years old and it is a convoluted story of how I acquired them.

The window was salvaged from our house in Oregon. The picture is of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area and was taken by Handy Husband.

Copper pitcher, wood candlesticks and amber jar were left by the seller.

Wall paint is Behr’s Arcade White in eggshell enamel.

Trim paint is Behr’s Bit of Sugar in semi-gloss.

Here are some other posts you might enjoy!

The dining room in our Georgia house.

Our Colonial Farmhouse living room in progress.

DIY Denim Pumpkins

How I refinished the dining table top here and the chairs here.

*affiliate links in this post*

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