Make It Pretty Monday: Country Porch

Thank you, Kathryn, for featuring my gardens on the Dedicated House's Sunday Showcase! What a surprise, and an honor to be in such elegant company.

This week I am inviting you to set a spell on my porch.

My front porch is definitely a working porch. By that I mean we use it, a lot. We work on projects there, sit in our rockers or on the swing to watch the birds in the mornings and drink a glass of wine and play with the dogs in the evening. Summer visitors are more likely to be out on the porch than in the house, and most of them love to sway gently in our old swing.

Here's a look at where we spend hours of our time in the warm weather:

The swing was a ReStore find--that's the Habitat for Humanity store that sells used building materials and all kinds of other things. It's a great resource for primitive and country decorating as well as remodeling, and there are stores located all across the country. We did nothing to the swing except buy some chain and hang it up.

The quilt on the back of the swing is just an unfinished top but I like the soft colors that seem to go so well with summer flower gardens, and it fits so well with my rustic home.

This little corner holds a lot of memories. The basket you can see in the top right corner is a tobacco basket, a memory of our tobacco-growing days. We used the corn planter when all five sons were still at home and we had a much larger garden. The three tines you can see in the top left corner belong to a wheat cradle which we never used, but I have had it here for many years. There are coal mining picks, a tribute to my husband's father, a bucket of garden hand tools, a little crock...so many things that have been here since I moved to this land 40 years ago. The washstand was given to me at a yard sale; I painted it and added new knobs and now it stores boots, bee spray, small tools and who knows what else. It's a catchall, really, but so handy. My hat is hanging over a slate I painted 25 years ago, my first and only attempt.

I liked the way the deck was reflected in the stained glass window behind the swing.

 These are the Granny and Poppa Larry rockers, gifts from our daughter-in-law Jennifer. Best seat in the house for birdwatching! The vine over the door came from Grapvine Point on the James River in Virginia, the place where the Jamestown settlers were getting ready to abandon their settlement and sail back to England when the supply ships were spotted on the horizon. The rest is history, as they say, and I like having this reminder of it on my porch. We picked up that big vine when my son Derek was stationed nearby. The round mirror is a nod to folklore--did you know that evil spirits have to stop and admire themselves in a mirror and that distracts them from entering your home. 'Tis so, according to old superstitions. Blue bottles also attract and trap them so there you see the blue bottle hanging on my porch as well as in the tree out in the garden.

And this is the view (well part of the view) we see from our porch. Just trees and flowers, the firepit, the sidewalk that really needs to be replaced, and in the distance two of the vegetable gardens and one of the grape arbors. Nothing fancy, but I never get tired of looking at it. 

If you're ever in the neighborhood, do stop by. I can promise you fresh-ground coffee, good conversation, and a comfortable place to rest on my country porch.

Linking again to Make it Pretty Monday. Do pay Kathryn a visit and see all the many creative ideas and projects completed by her readers.

Copyright 2012 Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.