The assignment for this weekend’s Apartment Therapy Style Cure is to go on a style treasure hunt and then share our findings. They were looking for a lot of original images, but honey I’m busy and that’s what Pinterest is for. So I turned off the “Secret” tab on my back porch board and set it loose on the web. You can see it here. Basically, after our style diagnostics, it seems like a sophisticated casual was what we were after. And since this is a semi-outdoors space, I decided that”glamping” (glam camping) would be a perfect touchstone for this project. And in an effort to follow the rules (which I am really not at all following, sorry AT) I will share this image I took from our dinner out on Saturday night:
JT and I went to The Vine for dinner — yummy Lebanese food with the vegan options very clearly marked but also other options for those occasional vegans like the husband. (In a weird twist of fate it’s next door to Treehouse, the other great vegan restaurant in STL. I will be visiting both and frequently.) I would say this falls into our “fancy and relaxing” category – amazing coffee served in a gorgeous brass carafe with fancy little espresso teacups.
So I’m calling it complete on that assignment. (Plus I have a bachelor’s degree in interior design and work for a commercial architecture firm. I know what my style is and also that it will probably change in five minutes.) We fast-forwarded to Day 3: Choose Your Room, Sit for 10 Minutes and Take Before Photos. The challenge of selecting the back porch as our Style Cure room is the amount of help it needs just to get up to snuff. But before I dive too deep into that let me show you an awesome before (from almost 10 years ago) when we bought the house and I didn’t know how to take pictures.
Wowsa right! John Deere green peel and stick floor tiles and gorgeous barn red panels. That door you see is what is now the music room door — there’s another real back door directly behind it so it didn’t really make sense there.
And here’s the floor plan before I hit you with the some more before pictures so you can orient yourselves. Previously all my floor plans ended at the kitchen but this room is off the back of the kitchen (and almost the same size).
We had an intermediary phase where we pulled up the peel and stick floors and painted the concrete underneath a nice white color. While we were at it, we covered the barn red with “Porpoise” from Sherwin Williams. However this phase didn’t last too long as the dogs go through this room five hundred times a day to go to the backyard and white floors and muddy dog paws don’t really mix. JT and his dad tiled it with the same floor tile we used in the kitchen (but before we did the kitchen) and then it became the junk collecting room.
Some more befores:
This weekend JT tackled the main flaw in this room: rot. He did some selective demo and reconstruction of the frames of one of the windows — it was almost all rotted and held together by not much as far as we can tell. The previous owners had tried to disguise the rot with a pice of aluminum flashing but it wasn’t really fooling anyone.
The paneling was also not caulked and/or attached in any permanent way so it was starting to warp away from the wall and get moisture behind it. It had to go as well.
There is also five hundred mega-painted over hooks and nails that I got to remove.
We have a solid week or more of caulking, sanding, painting and cleaning ahead of us before this thing is in any kind of shape. The good news is that JT got the window frame rebuilt and the back porch is much more “buttoned up” than it ever was before.
What were you guys up to this weekend? Does anyone volunteer for caulking/sanding/scraping/spackling/painting torture? Me neither. Cheers – CT
Living Analog 
