Infinite possibilities, indeed!

I’ve been limping along on the Infinite Possibilities Porch… mostly because the color choices are driving me crazy. I initially wanted a periwinkle blue house with some kind of peachy trim and a reddish door. Glidden’s color coding led me to believe that all of these colors would work well together. But alas, it was not to be.

Unhappy with the “pink and blue” effect of the first combination, I redid the trim with a darker color named Ripe Apricot. Here you can see the original trim color on the left, the new trim color on the right, and the house color on the bottom.

I thought it would look good. I wouldn’t have painted both windows and the door trim with it if I didn’t believe that. But once they were done and I held them up against the house color, they looked gaudy. So I tried toning it down with Belgian Waffle, the color I used (and quite liked) on my puzzle house.

Below you can see the Belgian Waffle (left) compared to the Ripe Apricot (right). In the picture, the Belgian Waffle doesn’t look too different than original trim color, but in reality it’s more orangy and less pink—kind of like the inside of a creamsicle, where the creamy outside has melted into the vanilla ice cream center. (Yum!)

Again, at first I thought I was on the right track. But after another coat or two, I still wasn’t happy with it. The colors just seemed off. Also I was having trouble with the door, which was supposed to be a darker (complementary) color. The paint just didn’t seem to want to stick, and even after several coats I didn’t have a nice finish.

In a fit of frustration, I sanded off the red on the door and slapped some dark gray I had lying around over the windows and door trim. By this point I had so many coats covering up one another that the finish on the trim was really crappy. On the door, I was able to sand off the red from the surfaces but couldn’t get it out of the crevices around the panels.

Rosy, hearing all the grumbling and swearing with each subsequent paint attempt, popped her head in to see what I was working on. This is as far as she’s allowed to come into the workshop, and she knows it!

At this point I stopped working on the porch for about two weeks—that’s how frustrated and annoyed I was. Funny how such a stupid little thing can completely sap all motivation to continue. (I’m getting worked up again just writing about it!)

After a bit of soul searching, I’ve decided to keep the red accent on the door, and paint the rest of the door the same color as the house. As for the trim, I’m still not thrilled with it, but I’m going to let it sit a while and see if it grows on me. If not, I’ll buy some new parts and start over (probably with a lighter shade of gray, I’ll have to check the Glidden paint chips for something that goes better than this one). I just don’t want to try painting these windows again. If anything, it’ll be cathartic to throw them away!

While all these various coats of paint were drying, I assembled the structure, added siding, and painted it. Here’s how the porch looks today…

I stained skinny sticks for the porch and replaced the tops of the stairs, which were MDF, with strip wood so they could be stained to match. As you can see in one of the pictures above, the back edge of the porch isn’t quite flush with the wall, and the door is kind of hovering above the top of the porch. (Both are problems with the kit pieces and not due to any mistakes I made, for once!) The skinny stick flooring on the porch takes care of these gaps.

The (unpainted) post in these pictures isn’t final… I’ll wait to decide what to do with that until after I’ve made a decision on the trim color. I’m not sure yet if I want to add a railing. I’d like to put some furniture on the porch but now that it’s all put together it doesn’t seem that big, so I’m going to have to play around and see what will fit.

After all the angst, I am pretty happy with how the door turned out. Even if I end up changing the trim color, I’ll probably keep the door the way it is. And of course I’m planning to add trim along the edges and to fill in any visible cracks, like in the picture below where the siding meets the edge of the roof…

I’m planning to shingle the house using Greenleaf siding strips cut down to size. (I did the same with my puzzle house; it’s a great, inexpensive source for half scale shingles.) I’ve already stained them using some slate-colored Minwax stain that I got for $1 off the Oops bin at Home Depot.

After it’s shingled, I’ll probably put the porch aside for a while to let the trim color issue simmer. My mom is building one too (we started it together when she was here for Christmas) and I might wait to finish mine until her next visit so we can landscape them both together.