Summer, dare we say, has arrived and with it the burning desire for projects!

We’ve been cooped up for so many months and any nice weekend in April and May has been chalk full of activities so for the long Memorial Day weekend we opted for zero plans with anyone but ourselves. It’s been glorious. As we looked around the inside and outside of the house we realized a perfect easy project would be to stain the front porch, which we didn’t get to last fall.

I don’t know how often people stain their porches or decks but when we went to The Home Depot it sure seemed like there were a lot more options than when we stained our deck at our 1475 West Pond Road house. Ben and I agreed we didn’t want to just put a coat over the cedar but deciding on the color wasn’t easy.

The gal recommended transparent but the color options weren’t what we were going for–and then I saw it–semi-transparent Coffee. I could picture the color working well with the gray of the house and bringing out the darker color in our front stone. Too, it just felt a little rustic which is something we like both inside and out.

Two easy coats and voila! The porch looks night and day different. There are three things I love about the stain color we selected:

1. The gray and white trim really pop.
2. The varying colors in the stone definitely stand out more.
3. Our porch looks significantly bigger.

And so, with that I can gladly say to neighbors and visitors, have a porch of coffee.