Front Porch Makeover (French Country Vintage) Thrifty Porch Decorating Ideas + Flower Pot Projects!

Hello there! I am working on the porch today. It's a beautiful day here in Michigan. Join me today for a spring and summer porch makeover. I'm going to be adding lots of beautiful plants and some topiaries. I'm focusing on a French country decor style for my porch. You're going to love the makeovers that I do on some pots and all the personalized touches that I'm going to be doing to make my front porch my dream French country summer oasis. I'm getting some plants hung. We went to the nursery and I got a lot of ferns. I got some topiaries that I'm going to be planting. My next goal is going to be to put these faux boxwood topiaries and my urns on the front of my porch. So I picked these up at Menards today. They were $50 a piece. I'm hoping that they will hold up and last quite a long time on this one. This one sadly fell off my porch earlier but uh looks like it survived okay. But yeah I think these are really cute and like I said I hope that they last really well all season long. So let's try and get these planted. I'm using these urns that I got at Home Depot and I am also using some like river rock that we also picked up from either Menards or Home Depot and I'm placing that in the bottom of the urn and then I will be adding the topiary on top of that and then I'm adding more stones on top of that so that these topiaries are very secure and that they can withstand whatever crazy Michigan weather comes our way. So so far it's been a couple weeks and they have not budged. I think they're going to last a very long time. And I've also been doing some repair on the brick. I just did some pointing. All right so I have this and let me spin it around here. Mortar repair and what's nice is it comes with oops let me see if I can get it to focus. There we go. It comes with this applicator tip that I think is going to make it really easy to put it in and kind of smooth it out. So here we go. Let's point some brick on this old Victorian home. And now I am going to try and fix some concrete issues that we're having in the steps here. So let's see how that goes. All right so here is what I'm going to try and repair today. These enormous cracks. All right I'm no concrete expert whatsoever so I'm just doing the best that I can with what I have. But I got this here so hopefully that is gonna help at least. I'm sure it's not going to be a professional job but something is better than nothing at this point and I'm the one that's doing it. So that's what we're going to use. So if you guys want to watch me do that then here we go. Okay I'm thinking of moving some things around. I'm really getting excited and anxious to get started on getting my porch a nice refresh for summer. I have this piece here that's just kind of been sitting here not being used. It's a nice piece we just don't need it. It came with the house. I think they had it built to go with the kitchen that they put in but it's just not working for us. So I thought what if I put this on my porch and used it for storage and then also I could put plants and different things on it to display. So I was thinking of actually moving it onto the porch on the other side of this window here. There's a little nook. It pretty much mirrors this space but on the outside. All right so I have that piece outside on my porch and I was thinking that I would try and deepen the top because it is just a butcher block. I think they meant to use it as a like an island that they could cut on but we just aren't going to use it for that purpose. There's just not enough room to store it to roll it in and out of that room out of our kitchen. So I thought that I could maybe deepen it and get rid of some of the yellow just so it goes with you know my darker antique wood that I really like. So I thought I would try this Rust-Oleum Aged Glaze and see if that kind of deepens it a little bit instead of having to use like a a dark stain. So that's what I'm going to do now. All right so this is where I'm thinking I want to hang my cement beautiful bust here planter. So we went and got some appropriate drill bits today and some screws. So I'm going to see if I can do it myself. Let's hope that I can because my husband's working on a project right now also. So let's see if I can get her hung all by myself. She is very heavy. My husband's help this part. Hello and happy Sunday. I'm still working on my spring summer porch refresh. I'm slowly adding more plants and flowers. So we just stopped at Home Depot. I picked up some more plants. Let me show you here what I have. I'll be doing some planting and at the end of this video you'll get to see the big porch reveal. To give my front porch decor a little bit more character I tried to use vessels that I had around the house. Some vintage pieces that I have thrifted. One being this chamber pot that I thought I could use to put these flowers in. I did have to add some stones to the bottom just to help with the drainage since I obviously wasn't going to drill any holes into this antique chamber pot. But with all that said I do think it turned out quite lovely. Okay I have this vase that I thrifted not too long ago and I thought that maybe I could try to make this a flower pot. I'm really trying to get creative here and like I said I do not have a green thumb whatsoever. I am just experimenting and I'm sure I will learn every year right? That's the way that you learn is by trying different things. So let's add some rocks for drainage. And now we're finally ready to start making over some pots and decor that I'm going to be putting on my porch in a vintage French country style. So I'm just going to make these plastic planters look a little bit more aged and cement like with some chalk paint and spackling mixed together. And then over top of that I'll be doing a really fun IOD stamp in a crockery type of a look. So definitely stay tuned because there's more projects to come. Okay so I have these crockery stamps from IOD. Again I'll have these linked below and I thought that maybe that would look cute on the front of these pots. So I'm just going to pick one out here. I've used this one already. Maybe I'll just use that one again. Okay and then here is the IOD ink. This is just black. So I'm going to put this in my ink pad here. If you're new to the IOD stamps before you apply them to your surface you do want to use a little bit of a light sandpaper such as 220 grit to just rub over the surface and that will help the ink adhere a lot better. All right so the next project here is this watering can that I've had for a little while. I think since last summer. It's just a you know regular old water can I think from like Menards or something just plastic but I thought that I could maybe make it look a little bit cuter and I'm gonna try that by spray painting it white and then maybe adding some more transfers onto it to give it a French country look. All right so now it's time to apply some transfers or stamps or something to this plain old white watering can. You saw me spray paint it so we need to jazz it up a little bit make it look a little more French country or vintage. So let's see what I have that we can put on here and make it look a little bit cuter. Okay here's my IOD collection. I have these new ones here. These are transfers. I can't remember the name of the collection but I will go ahead and I'll link it down below but there's just some beautiful. Oh look at this one. I absolutely love this one. How gorgeous is that? I need to find someone really special for that but they have all these really cute like little labels for seeds and stuff I believe is what it's supposed to be. So cute. Let's see. Any of those work on here? The only bad thing is that it's got these grooves in the front so that's going to make it difficult for anything that I want to put on. But these would be kind of fun wouldn't they? Okay not this one. Looks like a magazine which is cute. Let's see. So I have these potting transfers. Let's see. This might be kind of cute. Oh actually let's see. They have some in they have some in blue that I think would be pretty because I have a lot of blue on my porch. Like one of these. Let's see which one do we like? Maybe this one? Plants. Rare plants. I don't speak French but I think that's supposed to be saying like rare plants or something so that might be kind of cute. I want to see if that will work on here. This will be my first time adding a transfer or something with all this texture on these raised bumpy parts. Let's see if this works. All right I went ahead and cut out my transfer. Let's see if we can get it on all these bumpy bits. We'll see how this works. And now I'm adding some Antiquing Glaze by Rust-Oleum over top of this entire watering can just to give it a really nice aged look. I'll link that below for you guys so you can go ahead and grab it. And I like to apply it and then kind of wipe it away so that it looks you know like it's lived on there for a while. Definitely one of my favorite products to use to create a really natural looking antique finish. And here is the last project that I have for my French Country Porch Makeover. It's just this potted plant that I picked up at a nursery. The pot was black and I'm trying to keep all my pots in a white and then I'm also going to add the IOD stamp on top of it to give it that French potted kind of an aged look to it. So stay tuned because after this project we will be looking at the complete porch reveal how I have everything styled. It looks so nice out there. It is like another room of my home. I just love it. So right now I would also like to invite you to subscribe. I have lots more content coming, thrifting, thrift flips, flea markets. It's that time of year. So I hope that you will stick around and follow me on this creative homemaking adventure.