The One That Got Away And A Porch Plan

Nothin’ like a little Jake Owen to get a blog post goin’…you know…”The One That Got Away”…the song…by Jake Owen?  Do you guys get the country pun-ie titles?  Or is that just a I-grew-up-in-Northern-Maine kind of thing?  Anywho…let’s talk about our one that got away…enter our dream home:

You may have seen that pic on our Instagram feed a couple weeks ago.  So here’s the back story.  On a random Wednesday, Colby was cruising Trulia, our go-to site for tracking down homes for sale and general ogling of real estate.  Not that we’re in the market for a new home.  We “read” Trulia most mornings like normal couples read the morning paper.  It’s a sickness.  We even have conversations like “Colby:  Did you you see that white house in Orrington?  Angie:  Oh, the one with 15 acres on the main road or the one closer to Bucksport with 2.5 acres and the massive garage?  Colby:  The first one, they just lowered the price today by ten grand.”  I wish I was kidding.  So one random evening while I was half asleep on the couch, Colby starts poking me (in the non dirty kind of way…sorry mom) saying “Angie, Angie, you need to see this, seriously, coherent yourself up” to which he showed me the most gorgeous and most perfect home I had ever laid eyes on.  It even had THE barn, the one we had always envisioned for our dream country home.

So naturally we called up our old realtor and made an appointment to go see the compound.  And equally naturally fell in love with the old home.  On the way home from seeing the farmhouse I started balling.  Like ugly crying.  I knew even though we both loved the home, which was so perfect for us, it would never happen.  Why?  Two factors…one, it’s on the wrong side of town.  It’s about 30-45 minutes away from my office but about 1.5 away from Colby “The Salesman” Campbell’s key customers/accounts.  And factor number two…we are by no means ready to sell our house.  We’re talking there are giant holes in the ceiling of not one, but two rooms in our home.  Both the porch and the kitchen are ginourmous messes (kind of like Miley at the VMAs).

So I have a point here, give me another minute and I’ll get there.  So after letting go of the old farmhouse we realized something.  Our current home, as much as we would like it to be, is not our forever home.  In fact, we’re aiming to sell it either this spring or more likely the following spring, and either look for our dream home or another fixer upper to build a little more sweat equity.  But just in case dream home in a dream location pops up, there are definitely things we could be doing in the meantime to prep our house for a quick sale.  Enter the porch makeover plan.  When we first moved into our home, the front porch looked a little something like this:

Far from pretty but it had some serious potential.  Fast forward three years and now it looks like this:

No one is buying our house with a porch like that!  Pretty much all we’ve done in this space is take up the plywood floor that covered up the old wood flooring, prime the walls underneath the windows, and rip a giant hole in the ceiling.  And by “we” I mean “Colby” who was trying to see what was going on up there for electrical and water damage since the roof up there used to leak before we fixed it last fall.

So basically we have a blank canvas for a front porch and the porch makeover wheels are spinning!  But before I commit to certain design decisions we have a few things to fix in here, which we’re planning on starting this weekend, you know, since we already have about a dozen half finished projects going on.  Why not start another one?!  And because I love lists here’s the porch repairs list:

• Repair the windows (they’re supposed to open but don’t, we need to remove the stops, take them out, shave the sash down and reinstall them)
• Repair the door (same problem as the windows, it just doesn’t close right and it lets all the rain come in)
• Repair the rotten floor boards and feather in some new boards with the old
• Refinish the floor (I’m thinking sanding it all down and staining it a nice, rich, dark stain to help hide all the wood imperfections)
• Fix the hole in the ceiling

The first project we intend on tackling is fixing the ceiling.  You know, start at the top with the ceiling and then work our way down to the floor.  We’ve already decided that the bead board is coming down.  Although we are salvaging it for other potential projects since it’s old and real bead board, not the giant MDF sheets we usually use.  So…ceiling options:

• Option 1:  Loft the ceiling and reinstall the bead board kind of like in this picture
• Option 2:  Loft the ceiling and install the salvaged bead board between the beams like this
• Option 3:  Loft the ceiling and keep the beams au naturale like this picture
• Option 4:  Loft the ceiling but keep the collar ties and just paint them white like this

Do you sense a “loft the ceiling” theme?  We’re hoping to make the tiny space feel a lot larger with a higher ceiling.  And honestly, option #4 is probably the one we’ll end up going with since it’s the easiest.  We know there are collar ties (the beams that go across the porch ceiling parallel to the floor) to deal with up there and we could theoretically remove them but that’s beyond our skill set.  We would rather the porch didn’t cave in on itself during a heavy snow…or slight breeze…or when Goose barks.  So option #4 is our game plan (fingers crossed).  And now it’s demo time!  It seems like forever and a day since we’ve demoed anything!  I’m off to grab my crowbar!  And make a mess!

For the record, that’s the last space we demolished.  Our master bedroom circa spring of 2012.  We’re overdue for another major renovation…hello porch remodel!

Pssst…I know it’s early to be thinking weekend plans, but what are you guys up to?  Any house projects penciled in the planner?  Demoing a porch ceiling like us?