@evelynandtheodore

Our Tiny Porch: Fall & Winter Planning

Fall weather has made a brief appearance here recently before we rocketed back up into the 80s, and I can't wait to have it back. Fall is my favorite time of the year. Bonfires, sloppy sweaters, boots, hot cider, the apple orchard... and the colors! The colors that come out in fall are so warm and cozy and they just make me want to curl up with fuzzy socks and candles.
Autumn is officially here this Friday, Sept 22, so you best bet all the scarves, boots, candles, and cocoa are getting busted out ASAP.




Now that fall is approaching, and summer is dwindling, I figured I should refresh the porch to match the season. The plants on the porch aren't really doing it any justice, and I want some bright color to pop, since the tomatoes and peppers never really came in.


I also want to create a reversible sign for the porch that will work for both fall & winter. I've done some rough sketches of what I'd like each side to look like, but have yet to decide fully on colors for the winter side (don't mind the weird paper, I did these on my lunch hour yesterday on some scrap paper).


I'll be doing a post on the sign when I do it, but I know I'll be using one of the wooden rounds I have left over from last year. I'm thinking of staining the fall side & using white lettering with a modpodged craft leaf, and painting the winter side, maybe adding in some teeny snowflake doilies or (oh the humanity, I don't know if I could actually do this...) glitter.



For fall, I'd like to clean the space up, and have yellow mums flanking the left side of the bench, and the right side of our door, under our mailbox. It'll help define the space, bring in some color, and add some semblance of symmetry to our porch.




I also have this skull pillow from Michael's from 2015. I'd have liked to get the coordinating raven, but I missed that train, since this is the first year that they aren't selling either of these since I first purchased mine. Even so, I think the skull will look good with the black bench, the brick, and will give our porch just the right amount of spook factor for Halloween.



I plan on hanging our solar lights under the overhang, since they have a slow strobe-like function, so I can use them for Halloween! Most nights that I turn them on, they'll just be solid, but sometimes you've gotta spice it up ;)
I'll add in some pumpkins & gourds, a faux fur blanket for when I'm drinking hot cider, maybe an antler or two (if I can figure out how to incorporate them), and it'll be perfect!

When winter comes along, all I'll have to do is flip the sign, bring out the potted trees from the storage unit, drape the solar lights around them, and switch out a few decorative accents and voila. Simple winter porch!




These trees are technically for indoor use, but the one I'll be using on our porch unfortunately is broken anyways, so hiding the original pot and cord in the big pot on our porch should work just fine for decorative purposes. We don't have any outdoor outlets, so I won't be able to use the pre-installed lights on it, but that's where the solar lights come in.
Not only do our lights have a strobe function, but they also have two blinking functions, one slow, one a little faster. I like the slow one, because the lights seem to fade and then come back. Both functions switch between every other light, so when half of them fade out, the other half fades in. It looks really nice, and I think it'll be nice to sometimes change up the way the porch looks by switching what mode the lights are in.


So that's the plan! I'm jam packed busy this weekend with a concert Friday & horror fest at the drive-in theater Saturday, so we'll see how I'm feeling about tackling some of this during the week and then Sunday. I have everything I need for the fall porch aside from pumpkins, so I have a good head start.


If you'd like to "shop the look," here are a few links!


Source Listing:
Black planters
Black Windsor bench
Potted trees (similar)
Solar lights
Mums (in store only, $4/each)
Wooden round (I'll do a tutorial on the reversible sign project soon!)
Skull pillow (similar)

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