We have two porches on our old schoolhouse home. One is the original schoolhouse entrance and is a covered porch. It is the one that I shared last week HERE. The other porch is our breezeway porch that connects our garage to our mudroom. We are trying to encourage people to use the front door more and we poured a concrete walkway to the porch to do so. (Before, you walked across the grass to get to the porch and front doors.) But, the breezeway porch is still quite visible and does get used often by delivery folks so I do continue to decorate it.
Sometime this summer we plan to remove the very dirty and yellowed vinyl siding on this porch and replace it with cedar siding. The parts of our home that were not part of the original schoolhouse like the garage and breezeway have the vinyl siding. The original house has white painted cedar siding which is in great shape. We will leave the new cedar siding that we add to the porch wood colored--I think it will update the house and make it fresh. BUT, until then I decided the breezeway porch needed a temporary house number that was big and visible.
We have house numbers near the front porch, but they are hard to see, especially in the summer when the trees are full. I think I will have a white, black, and wood color scheme with touches of seasonal colors on the breezeway porch so I decided to stick with that for this temporary house number. I started with a fifty cent garage sale frame and some thin cedar wood pieces (I think they are hot tub siding pieces) that I got loads of for free.
I cut the cedar pieces to fit in the frame. I painted the frame black and then used wood glue to secure the cedar to the back of the frame. I weighted it down while it dried. I cut a piece of brown paper bag to fit the back and glued it on the back as well to further secure the cedar slats. I then chalked out my house numbers and painted them with white paint. They aren't perfect, but they are large and easily visible from the street.
When we re-side the porch, if I decide to keep this address sign, the cedar wood will get painted white and then I may add large bronze or black metal house numbers. Underneath the house number sign, I added a black, metal mailbox that I purchased from the thrift store for $3.
I wanted to add a touch of green to the mailbox but we are a good two months out from having anything fresh and alive outside in Montana so I used a greenish-yellowish fake
hydrangea that I found.
I clipped the individual stems and removed the leaves. Now I know it is not hydrangea season, but I thought the individual stems and petals looked a bit like a shamrock or four leaf clovers. I added a little piece of packing styrofoam to the bottom of the mailbox and stuck the stems in there. I added a green jute "bow" to finish the March green decor. I will plant flowers in the mailbox mid-May. I like the mailbox for future, seasonal decor too--fall leaves and gourds, pine branches and red berries.
I hope to share the whole porch with you by the end of the week. We are expecting some arctic cold, -14 Thursday morning, so we will see if the outdoor projects take precedence. Don't be afraid to decorate and make temporary projects. Waiting until everything is just so is no fun at all.
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