Spring renewal: The front steps

It's starting to be time for spring renewal around our house and one of the first projects that came to mind were the front steps. Wow, we were looking a little derelict, if I must say so. I guess it had been at least ten years since the steps were painted and it showed!


Here they are just after we started to work on them, so even though we had started to scrape the bottom step, they honestly didn't look much better than this. Poor babies!

We scraped and sanded and scraped and sanded. One of the steps is concrete, the other two are wood, and the sides are stucco. We also did some repair on the stucco. By the end of the first day we had finished the prep and had primed the whole thing white. That white really stood out - I can't say it looked 100% better than the derelict look, but we were making necessary progress. We quit for the day.

The next day we painted, and when we were nearly done we realized we had the wrong color. It was red, as the steps had been before and as the trim on our house is, but it was really really red. I'm saying it didn't match any of the other reds, sigh. The other can of red paint, which did say porch and floor on it, was too old to use. It had gotten all gummy. I went down to the local Ace Hardware and got another can of that, the Porch and Floor, in Tile Red.

Bingo! It was the right color and an extra coat of paint never hurt anything. Especially since we got it done and dried before the next rain! Here they are  - aren't they gorgeous?

Only problem is, now the porch obviously needs paint too. Well, that's the way with house projects. One leads to another.

P.S. Those are cauliflower plants alongside the steps, and they each have a baby cauliflower down in the middle of the leaves. Yum!

A shoe rack: Order out of chaos

Wayne put up a shoe rack by our back door the other day, and it's made our life a lot more orderly! Who could imagine such a small simple thing could make such a difference?

In the interest of less dirt on the floors, we try to take our shoes off when we come in. Of course, up until now, that has resulted in a pile of shoes by the back door. And wow, what a messy dirty pile it was, with all this rain and leaves and mud on the bottoms. We could hardly get the back door open sometimes for shoes. Not to mention, in order to sweep I had to pick up all the shoes first and put them somewhere else (in a pile).

Isn't this cool?? So neat. So clean. So out of the way!

It was easy to make, too. I saw this video a couple of months ago and kept it with the intention of making just such a rack. First, I love it that the construction person making the video is Sawdust Girl - you don't get so many how-to construction things done by women, and why not?? We know how to do things too, right?

Anyway, I bought the pegs she recommended and then let them sit while all the holiday madness swirled around us. If they hadn't been out on my desk, I might have forgotten about them. The other day, we finally got around to it.

What a great idea!!