DIY: House Number Door Mat

I've had a pair of black resin planter boxes out front for a while now and they keep getting these weird white marks on them that don't really clean off. Every time I walk by them I make a mental note to do something about it. Then I saw this image on Pinterest:

White! Glorious, bright white. So fresh and so clean. Why fight the mysterious white marks and why spend big bucks on new planters when these are fine? So I busted out a can of primer and put on a good four coats. I love the chalky white finish.

I remembered my grandpa telling me once that white gravel is great for planter boxes because it helps retain moisture. Plus it looks so pretty! I picked up a $5 bag at Home Depot and that was more than enough for my two planters.

I'm hoping the rocks help me keep these new fig trees alive. The trees are supposed to be drought resistant, but that hasn't helped me in the past. I really need to be better about watering consistently - or maybe I should just put these on a drip system.

The new trees looked so pretty, I decided my coir door mat needed an update too! I picked up a roll of contact paper from the dollar section at Target and looked online for a pretty number 2.

Then I traced and cut out the contact paper stencil.

Then I removed the sticker backing and carefully pressed the paper into place, focusing on the inside edges. I also added some paper around the perimeter of the stencil to prevent overspray.

It's a good idea to spray in short bursts directly face-on when spray painting a stencil, rather than moving all around - the paint just gets under the stencil that way.

No too bad, right? I am thinking about adding a border around the perimeter like these mats, but I sort of like the simplicity here.

We still need a new lantern out front and I want to replace the doorbell and add a dummy handle to the stationary door. I also want to have a piece of marble cut for the threshold - I only need about 3" wide. I am buying a slab for a project I have for up in the studio and I think I'll just have the stone guys cut a piece for me then that I could throw down with some cement glue.

I would love to have a little bench out here someday soon too. Maybe to replace that silly little plant shelf thing. I've been poking around looking for something pretty, but I think I would like to find a vintage piece. I did find some treasures for outdoor spaces in my online searching though! Check these beauties out:

teak planter  //  wall planter  //  monogrammed mat  //  brass entry set  //  polished nickel entry set  // black planter  //  white planter

hanging plant basket  //  mailbox  //  short planter urn  //  polished nickel entry set (mine!)  // greek key coir mat  // black hammock

bullet planter  //  b/w house numbers  //  brass planter  //  black planter  //  white outdoor sconce  //  klismos outdoor bench  //  brass entry set (the ultimate dream!! swoon.)

The Most Incredibly Affordable Outdoor Barn Lights!

I really wanted some chalky black outdoor barn lights for the back porch and around the rest of the house. I was going to have to order about ten lights, so paying $200 each or whatever was not going to happen!

It looks like the price moves around a bit (I think shipping is free now), but I found these American Fluor Barn Lights on Amazon last month for only $35 each!! I was a little nervous they would look and feel cheap, but they are the real deal barn lights! Nothing fancy and built to last! Apparently you can get them at feed and tack stores for something like $25! I've heard Menard's has them for a similar price too.

The parts are incredibly well-made and beautiful. The inside of the shade is white porcelain and the outside is galvanized metal, so you'll probably want to paint the outside like I did, but it's super easy. I just put the shades face down on a drop cloth and sprayed the outsides with Rustoleum's flat black enamel. No tape necessary! I actually like that I wasn't paying for an exterior finish that I would have wanted to change anyway. The perfect base for a DIYer!

Do you have any favorite barn light sources? These were far and away the best deal I found, especially with such a large shade (14"!!).

DIY Geometric Cube Painted Floor

For the longest time, I've had plans to paint a geometric cube pattern on an exterior floor. I really hoped to get to do it on our balcony porch in Brooklyn, but we moved before the weather gave me a good chance to patch the cracked concrete. When we moved to the Valley house I thought this little back porch area we have just off the kitchen and living room would be the perfect chance to scratch that itch!

I ended up going with a tumbling block tile in the bathroom, so I wanted this pattern to feel different. I saved this image a while back and it felt like the perfect inspiration - the proportions seemed easy enough to recreate (which, WRONG. Triangles, you kill me!) and it seemed like it wouldn't be too crazy on the eyes when painted on a large surface.

The first step was cleaning the concrete. We used a power wash sprayer to clean the old concrete and then we tried to not step on it before we got the first coat of water-based porch and floor paint down. I ended up watering down the paint because I wanted the finish to be a little mottled or translucent, so it almost, almost looked like a stain instead of paint. I mostly just didn't want the solid, flat look of a painted floor. Not that I was trying to age it, but I also didn't want the floor to look brand new and I think the watery paint helped get that look.

Then Kate and I worked to tape out the beginnings of the pattern. We knew we wanted the pattern to be on the larger side, so we made the main criss-cross pattern 12" wide.

Then it was time to put our heads together and do some serious math. I don't hate math at all, but I can't remember a lot of what I learned in trig and calculus, but luckily my smart husband has a memory like a steel trap and he busted out some formulas that helped us figure out the right angles. The most helpful measurement ended up being the hypotenuse (which was a little under 27 and 3/4"). Once we had that line measurement, we could back our way into the distance between the other angles and lines and it was easy to mark and then lay down the diagonal lines of tape.

It felt a little tricky when we were in the thick of it, but it really wasn't all that bad. I think I was just nervous because I knew every measurement had to be spot-on perfect for the pattern to look right.

Somehow I can't find the photos of this part, but I divided the 27.71 hypotenuse number in half to figure out the dimensions of a diamond. I draw and cut out a diamond shape on poster board and used it like a stencil to trace out the smaller diamond in each of the larger diamonds. I also used a straight edge to make a line connecting the side point of the smaller diamond with the larger (you can see this in two photos down).

We watered down more porch and floor paint and filled in the shapes. We used Benjamin Moore's Titanium on the background, the white is Swiss Coffee, the yellow is Ochre and the darkest gray is Martha Stewart's Seal.

Kate and I have pretty steady painting hands, so I felt comfortable free-handing the lines, but it wouldn't have been too hard to tape off the small shapes one by one for perfectly perfect lines.

There were some spots that the tape pulled off the bottom layer of paint, but I think that had more to do with the concrete prep than the paint or the tape. I could have easily just touched up the lines and called it good, which we did to a little of, but we used a light hand there and even ended up lightly sanding the whole floor to take some of that new edge off. (again, that was a personal preference thing).

The result was just what I was hoping for. I know this floor is going to take a beating, so I didn't want it to look too precious from the get-go. We put two coats of porch sealer on top, and so far no big problems with scraping or flaking, even in this 115 degree heat! :)

I love seeing the pattern peek through the living room doors, and the girls love playing a crazy version of hopscotch on the pattern. We're excited for better weather too, when we can really start to enjoy the porch again and eat our meals outside. :)

New House Color!!

We just passed the one year mark here in Arizona. What a year it's been! There, for sure, have been some hard moments, and we miss parts of living in the city like crazy, but overall, we're so happy and grateful for this past year. Mostly, it has been wonderful to live so close to family and of course I've loved getting to turn this house upside down! I can't believe how much has changed since last July. The exterior was the most recent big change and I'm so happy with how it turned out!

Benjamin Moore, a company I love and support whole-heartedly, saw that we were planning to paint our house and reached out about donating the paint. What an AMAZING help that was! The house needed a ton of prep work before the paint, and we made some big changes to the exterior structures with a contractor, so the labor alone ended up taking most of our exterior budget. Getting to work with Benjamin Moore on the paint was a dream come true! :) But I'll get to that in a minute. Here's the story of how the exterior of our house has changed this year, and a few plans for finishing up.

Remember when the house looked like this? Gingerbread everywhere. Cream body and brown trim. Black, scary sun shades on all the windows (which are helpful for keeping out the sun, but man, are they UGLY!).

The first big project was changing out the front door. It's hard to show in pictures just how much of a transformation this was! The old door was only 80" tall, which felt so squatty with the tall vaulted entrance. Here's the post on changing out the door.

We chose a 9.5' tall double door. It fit the vertical space much better, but the door was blocked in the front by the weird front facade area.

My original thoughts were to just remove the front panel and open everything up all the way to the roof basically.

But after we opened it up, the proportions felt so weird again! Too much was exposed, although, I was loving how much light was streaming in to the entry after getting rid of that partition piece!

Our contractor was nervous about losing the cross beam altogether as well, even though it wasn't technically the load-bearing beam. So we came up with an idea to bump up the beam and add angled beams in too, which we would mimic all around the exterior of the house, where all the gingerbread used to be.

All the turned columns were replaced with chunky square beams and instantly everything felt more modern and more balanced.

Once the exterior structural changes were almost done I went to my local Benjamin Moore store (Color Wheel on Stapley and Main) and looked at swatches for a good long while. I talked to them about different paint lines too and got their advice on that and finishes.

Benjamin Moore has so many wonderful colors it was tricky to pick a favorite for the house. I was drawn to the greeny grays the most and picked up a couple of chips and even a few sample pots to put up.

I put this photo up on Instagram for a reader vote. It seemed pretty split, which I expected. They're all great colors! (Top to bottom: Fieldstone, Desert Twilight, Rockport Gray)

I really tried hard to make it not be the name the put me over the edge, but Desert Twilight (2137-40) was my favorite from the get-go. It was a little more green than I originally thought I'd want, but more and more I was in love with the shade and the idea of a greeny gray house. (Or at least I didn't want a color with very blue undertones and I felt like my other top choices swung more blue). I put up a big sample on the front and the back of the house, so we could see what Desert Twilight did at different times of day.

I was a little apprehensive to make the final call, but I knew I'd love the color, especially once all that icky brown color was gone.

We chose to use the Aura exterior line in a Satin finish for both the body and the trim. My Benjamin Moore store said there's nothing like it on the market that resists color fading and paint deterioration as well, which were both problems we could see the house has had in the past. My wonderful team of painters (Eagle Painting) loved the product and commented multiple times about the quality of the paint. They were super impressed with the coverage.

It was an exciting day when the painters sprayed the first coat of Aura on the back of the house! So pretty! So dramatic!

The Aura paint is actually self-priming, so we didn't need to use a primer on the back at all, but the front of the house gets a lot of full sun and there had been some damage from the elements. And since I wanted to paint out the weird shake shingles on the front of the house, the painters decided it would be a good idea to spray a coat of primer on the front. I knew the shake would never be a consistent, solid color the way that the siding looks, but I think the layer of primer helped even out the shake shingles. 

I think painting the shake out helped unify the choppy look of the house so much! I almost painted out the brick for the same reason, but I think I'm glad we kept the brick as-is for now. It was tricky to find a stopping point with the brick and I didn't want to paint the floors or the fencing.

We might figure out something to do with the brick down the road, but for now I think the new house color is in harmony with the tones of the brick. Such an improvement!

As soon as the white trim went on, I finally felt like I could catch my breath and let go of my worries about this project! It looked SO much more fresh with the dark trim gone!

We chose White Dove (OC-17) for the trim and Onyx (2133-10) for the doors. All Aura, all satin.

We decided to keep the front door red in the end. I love how it looks against the Desert Twilight color! I was worried it would look Christmas-y, but it really doesn't. I actually think the red tones down the green a bit too.

So, I'm sure you noticed, but we still have a way to go with the exterior of the house before we can call it good. We're saving our pennies right now so we can replace the roof next spring. It's expensive and not fun to spend that kind of money, but we've known about it and it is what it is. In the shorter term, we're going to have a mason come out and fix some of our broken bricks and then add matching brick to the bases of the two new columns flanking the front door. 

Looking down the road maybe a year or two, I'd like to change up the landscaping. Not sure with what, but something less twisty and curvy and fussy would be my preference. But truly, I am SO happy with all the changes we've accomplished in only a year's time! Every single one of our neighbors has stopped by to say how much they love it too and the validation feels great! :)

And OF COURSE, thank you, thank you, thank you to the wonderful people at Benjamin Moore, both local and corporate, for helping us to transform our home! We could not be more happy with the product or the outcome. :)