Before & After: A Screened-In Porch

July 17, 2011 | by Ethan (email) |

If you’ve been following along, you know that we’re in the fourth week of our annual Before and After series. We’ve already seen some beautiful transformations including a bathroom, bedroom and a porch.

This weeks before and after story comes to us from Brittany at Pretty Handy Girl! For winning, Brittany will receive a $50 gift card to Home Depot, Lowe’s or Amazon. Plus, we’ll make a $100 donation to Habitat for Humanity in her honor. If you’d like to one of our weekly winners, check out the official announcement and send us your story! Brittany’s before and after is about her screened-in-porch and I love it because of all the furniture they built / repurposed / salvaged. Let’s take a look:

So, after living here for 4 years, I finally got around to giving the screen porch a much needed makeover.

This is basically a representative “before” picture taken the month before we bought the house.

After we moved in, it stayed the same except we had a white square table and chairs for meals on the porch. Slowly I have been furnishing and decorating the porch with fixtures and accessories like: Ladder Display Shelves, Beachy Coffee Table,  Minnow Trap Lights, Bamboo Painted Rug, Dream Big Butterfly Window, and my Garden Bench. My budget for this makeover was next to nothing, which presented a little bit of a challenge.

So, are you ready? Here is a tall glass of sweet tea with lemonade. Please come join me on my porch:

The two side chairs are actually from the table and chairs set. I just dressed them up with IKEA throw pillows. Someday I want to buy some wicker rockers to put in their place.

Remember the disgusting moldy coffee table I saved from the trash? There she is!

My favorite spot on the weekend. My Dad gave me this hammock for my 30th birthday and it is still in good shape after 10 years! Thanks Dad!

My semi-famous ladder display shelves I built from a $15 rickety old ladder.

The minnow trap pendant lights add the perfect amount of light after dark.

Were you wondering where I hung my Dream Big Butterfly window? Here she is:

That chippy little cabinet is the most expensive piece of furniture on the porch! I paid $85 for it at the flea market. It used to be a table, but someone cut off the legs and nailed boards to the sides and added a door to the front.

Such a great spot for catching up on my favorite magazines: Country Living, Better Homes and Gardens and Flea Market Style (the issue Layla and Kevin were recently in.)

Can you believe a neighbor was trying to get rid of this little decorator table? I gladly sprinted over to her house to pick it up. Then I draped a clearance shower curtain from Target over it. Yup,that is a shower curtain!

{Sigh} My favorite flower, blue hydrangeas.

Remember that purple garden bench? Well, she wasn’t weathering the constantly changing weather conditions, so I brought her in the porch and gave her some TLC and a few coats of paint. I just need to sew a cushion for her.

Thank you so much for coming over. I enjoyed our time together. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with a hammock. Zzzzzzz.

Thanks Brittany!

I am super impressed with all the furniture you made for the porch! I especially liked the trashy beachy coffee table and the painted bamboo rug- very creative.

Habitat for Humanity Factoid

Habitat puts out an annual report that is publicly available on their website. If you look at their most recent report, you’ll find that they’ve outperformed every year since 2006. Even in a struggling economy they served almost 75,000 families worldwide in 2010, not counting the aid for land tenure and technical assistance. That’s up more than 13,000 from the previous year, and right now Habitat has a goal of serving 100,000 families in 2013.

Where’s Your Before and After Story?

We hope you’ll consider submitting a Before & After story. Email your pictures and a “how to” description to beforeandafter@oneprojectcloser.com to join in.

Help Us Spread the Word

Are you a blogger? If you’d like to support us, please write an article on your blog about the contest, and consider adding one of our buttons to your sidebar. You can find the buttons and more information on our main Before and After article.