House File: Updating the Porch

The porch.

Next on the list for the house: painting the porch. In truth, the entire roof of the porch needs to be replaced, but that's going to have to wait. In the meantime, Matt and I need to fix the peeling paint and broken trim and try to spruce it up a bit.




The view from the other side. This is a duplex, so there are two doors to contend with. We live on one side and rent out the other.

One of the challenges is that we replaced the gutters last year and decided to match them to the existing green paint. Which means we have these forest green rain spouts.



It makes it a bit of a challenge in picking out exterior paint colors. I really wanted a bright red door with a little orange or ruby tone to it, something that might match the rose bush that blooms at the front of the house. But combined with the green, it would look too much like Christmas.




My mom made a trip to a Budeke's, a paint store in the Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore, and the staff helped her select some nice exterior color combinations from Benjamin Moore. Here's what we've decided...

The porch itself will be painted Rainforest Green, which appears to have enough gray in it to match the mortar. I really wanted to get rid of that evergreen color.

The doors will get a deeper burgandy red, to keep it from looking too garish with the green:



And the trim between the front door and the screen door will get a lighter accent color to make the door pop. (This was suggested by the experts at the paint store). Again, we went with something that picks up the mortar of the stone house:



There is a crew coming today to help wet-scrape and sand the flaking paint off the porch. We hope to have the paint job done by the weekend.



We still need to pick out a screen door for our side of the duplex. I want a French screen door that can be switched out with glass in the winter months and can therefore function throughout the year. Opening the doors lets in so much light on our first floor. I've been looking at the doors at Walbrook Lumber and online at Vintage Doors.

So do we try to match the style of the adjacent screen door? Or do we pick our own?

I tend to lean towards a simple screen door made of wood that is split in two sections.





Imagine these painted in that Burgandy color to match the front door.



This has a more intricate split: two pieces of wood in the center instead of one.