porch

It’s been over two years since I bragged about how pretty I was gonna make this porch one day and now the time has come.

porch before

Here’s where we started. A lonely, uncomfortable picnic table. Which I still love. I just don’t want to sit there for over 20 minutes.

porch makeover

What a difference!

It truly feels like we added an extra room onto our house. FOR REAL.

We love it out here! My sister and her family came the other day and we all sat out here for six hours straight. The men and animals took naps, Emily and I laughed and worked and we all ate pizza and I finally love this porch.

view to the porch

You can see the porch from the kitchen. And we even have doors that open up wide so the porch can be enjoyed and feel like it’s part of the house–this was one of my favorite parts of the house when we bought it, then we moved in and I promptly ignored it.

porch

I now feel like an actual adult because we have actual outdoor furniture.

Here’s the thing, if you have any kind of deck or porch, but ESPECIALLY a covered one, please make your next investment be some comfy outdoor furniture. We too, have other places where we have a patio set or outdoor furniture, but this is the first time I’ve had on our own covered porch attached to our very house and now I know what they mean on HGTV when they talk about outdoor rooms.

This is heavenly.

I’m going to sit here until it snows.

before & after of porch

planter head

storage

This beautiful furniture is from Nesting Place friend and sponsor, AE Outdoor (remember the Barn porch makeover when I partnered with them?!) and  all of their collections are so grown up. Finally someone is doing outdoor furniture right. They’ll even send you free fabric swatches so you can see and feel the quality.

nature

into the house

And here’s the view into the house.

outdoor room

I wanted to keep it all nice and neutral and textural because this is the one part of the house that has a really pretty view of trees and I wanted the focus to be on nature.

I shopped the house for a little table, extra pillows, a throw and picked the most outrageous weeds I could find.

all day

Remember when you are working on an outdoor room, you only need to focus on four things :

  1. seating
  2. surfaces
  3. lighting
  4. cozifiers

The seating and surfaces are obvious here (here’s a direct link to the Catalina collection that I have), for lighting, so far we’ve used only candles at night which is the best! and for cozifiers–throws, extra pillows and the most important: a rug–because I’m always walking out here barefoot and that’s another big part of it that makes it feel like a room: MUST HAVE A RUG.

porch makeover

porch makeover

Visit AE Outdoor and their blog to see all sorts of outdoor options and makeovers.