Front Porch Makeover

I'm linking this to:
Fall and Halloween Decorating by Readers of BNOTP! Welcome to the 92nd Metamorphosis Monday!

Welcome everyone!  You are invited to see our tiny little front porch transformed for fall.  Let me preface this by explaining a bit about our house.  We live in a townhouse (a lot of people call it a condo, but they are wrong) & have one shared wall.  This makes our front porch/entry a little odd.  It's really not too small, but a bit awkward, especially for taking photos.

The first pic is right after The Man (DH) power washed the walls & cleaned the window.  No, that's not a ghost you see, but me, reflected in those very clean windows.  This is my very blank canvas area & the only part of the porch that can be seen from the street.  You can't see it because of the security screen, but the wood door is that same shade of dark turquoise as the trim on the outside.  I love the color.

This is something a put together one day to replace a print that had long worn out its welcome.  Sorry about the reflection off the glass.  And it's not really crooked;  I guess I was holding the camera at an angle, honest.

This is how it all turned out.  I've had the wicker chair for years & it's been lots of different colors.  The large pot with the swag around it & the pumpkin on top is one that I had used forever on our living room display shelf (I'll show you before & afters of that pretty soon).  The tree branches are some that I foraged for on one of our morning walks & The Man was sweet enough to carry them home for me.  The mums (actually 3) are just tucked inside the bushel basket that I scored from Michael's yesterday for half off.  Also got the green pumpkin there, too.  Everything else are things I've had for years, including the cute little wreath on the door.

I'm pretty pleased with the way it looks.  When the weather starts to cool a bit, I'll be adding real pumpkins here and there.  I love tucking the small pumpkins in my larger flower pots.  Also plan to replace the jack-o-lantern pumpkins with regular pumpkins right after Halloween.

Hope you enjoyed the tour of our humble little porch/entry and please stop by again.

A little of this and a little of that!

Happy Tuesday to everyone.  Hope you all had a great weekend.  We spent most of our time cleaning up the backyard & getting it ready for our season of outside enjoyment.  Unless you live in the desert, you can't imagine the amount of dust that was covering everything!  Well, I've been taking lots of photos to show you, but haven't quite finished.  Will let you see those in the next day or so.

For today I just have to show you one more tweak I made to my mantel.  Okay, go ahead and laugh, because if you followed my Saga of the Mantel Dilemma, you'll remember how satisfied I thought I was with the end result.  So okay, just a reminder of what I thought was good.

Okay, here is where I pulled a little of this & a little of that together.  My collection includes an old jar, burlap, floral foam, sisal twine, moss of some kind, floral stems & a glue gun.  My floral stems were from Michael's & Walmart, whenever they were on sale for a $1 a piece.

The end result is this.

Now I'm satisfied!  Well, okay, please don't hold me to that.

My problem with the first photo was height or lack there of.  Everything seemed too low except for the side displays.  Now there is more variation & it's more pleasing, at least to me!

Thanks for stopping by.

Have a Happy 3-Day Weekend!

I hope most of you will be spending extra time with family & friends this weekend & getting to enjoy the Columbus Day holiday.  Here in the desert we are finally starting to have some cooler temps (anything under 100 is cooler to us), so a lot of this weekend will be spent cleaning up the backyard, planting, & getting ready for our outside season.  Everything is covered in dust right now, so cleaning will be the first order of business.  We also bought a bunch of flowers yesterday for bringing back some color to the area.  I plan to do some before & after photos in the not-so-distant future,  but doubt I will have time this weekend.

Before we leave for our walk, I thought I'd share a fun project that I did last year.  I'm a beginning quilter, so this is a very simple wallhanging, but it was so much fun & is just cheerful to look at.

Hope you all have a wonderful & safe weekend.