I took a few pictures of the porch area yesterday, since some of you had mentioned wanting a little tour.
In no particular order, here we go!
Our weathered former kitchen island. I know some of you preferred it in its previous pristine white, but I really love the way the way the elements have had their way with it. I love chippy.
The Boston fern is barely hanging in there since it had an unfortunate encounter with an unexpected hard frost while I was away in Brooklyn. I’m hoping it will recover after a nice long summer outside.
Just to the right of the entrance. The purple coneflowers have spread even more this year. We’re going to have masses of them. That’s the entrance to our basement and beyond that, the picket fence we recently added.
We figured out that we’ve had this glider for over 25 years. Don found it by the curb when we were living in San Diego. He paid $25 for it, so that works out to $1/yr. A bargain. We love it so much!
The vintage and rusty wrought iron planter I will never regret buying. I love it.
I had to wait until the impatiens had grown a bit.
It’s not really that different from other years, although I usually buy 3 of the purple hanging plants. But they’re expensive, so I just purchased one this year. The other hanging plants are full of impatiens. I usually buy one flat and from that I plant all the pots and the hanging pots as well.
We were chatting about the porch the other day, remembering that the moment I saw it, I wanted the house. Don’s selling point was the high ceiling in the kitchen. Mine was the porch. I grew up with a porch, which seemed big to me at the time, but was much smaller than the one we have now. Our neighborhood was full of porches and I have fond memories of playing, reading, chatting, and conversing with our neighbors – all from that porch.
We also had a porch on the house we rented in San Diego – which is why Don bought the glider. It was lovely as well, though I was so busy in those days that I didn’t get to use it as much as I would have liked.
And now we have this beauty. An extra room from April until November.
We’re grateful.
Stay safe.
Happy Thursday.
So beautiful,love the glider!
You most definitely have a green thumb:)
Thank you so much, Pat!
I love gardening.
Stay safe.
Beautiful as ever. So lush. I always admire your porch and gardening skills – good eye for balance. I’m curious where the doves are living this summer. ;-))
Hoping the allergies have peaked and are subsiding.
On other things: Working the elections in our area was very rough this time. No élection issues per se, just Covid-interruptus. About 50% of staff tested positive in about a week just before the majority of our Vote Centers opened in San Mateo County. When groups of us were doing in-person training, I remarked to myself how the whole office was working unmasked. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon how you look at it) voter turnout was low.
On the other hand, I was grateful to escape my mess of a house – terminal remodeling prep – to get moving again.
I don’t know where the doves are. I haven’t seen them in a couple of years and I miss them.
I was looking at photos online of a Blythe gathering in Belgium and noted that no one was wearing a mask – indoors. Predictably, several of the attendees and vendors now have tested positive for Covid.
I don’t know why voter turnout is so low for primaries. It’s very sad.
Stay safe, Martha.
Your porch is a dream! I love the glider, the flowers and the chippy paint on the former kitchen island. What a lovely place you and Don have. Hugs!
Thank you, Linda.
Happy Birthday!!!
xoxo
There is a house up the street from me that has an awesome porch and a beautiful yard full of flowers. The smell is incredible. The man who lives there puts in a lot of work . We call it the English garden house. I love to walk by it. I bet there are neighbors of yours that love to walk or drive by your house just for the awesome view. Every time you show pictures of either your yard or porch I certainly have an appreciation for all the work you have done to make such a lovely view that you kindly share with us. Thank you.
Here it would be drive by as we have no sidewalks. Thank you for your kind words, Beverly. They mean the world to me.
Stay safe.
Love your porch
In my house I owned my last home
I had a huge front porch with tons of wicker
I painted it yearly
Bright cushions
Lots of flowers
Here I have a patio and I like it but not like my porch
I grew up with a front porch
Can see my Mama (grandmother$ and my mother swinging with one foot pushing off waiting on me
Later waiting on the little ones
Aww takes me back
Love those pictures
I had wicker for a while, but it gets so windy and wet on the porch that I went with something sturdier that can stand up to the weather. But I love wicker on a porch.
Many memories for me, too.
Stay safe, Brenda.
I do love your front porch. I can just imagine sitting out there listening to the birds…whiling away the day. All the houses I’ve lived in never had one. When I was growing up, the emphasis was on backyard living. What are the flowers called in your hanging planter? They look like liatris, but that’s a perennial. The cottonwood is freely blowing around here…hope it doesn’t t last all that long. It’s everywhere.
Those wrought iron planters of yours are fantastic. Fair warning…if they are gone someday….I’m probably the culprit….lol.
On that note….enjoy your day! ;)
It’s scaevola, Donnamae.
I love listening to the birds out there. But it’s windy today and there’s pollen out there, so I’m going to stay in.
Thanks so much!
Stay safe.
what a great place for you and don to spend time, rest and relax! you both have gifts for taking good care of plants, finding cool things like the glider, using all your spaces and talents to make a place cozy and welcoming, for making a home …! and then you express your gratitude … all beautiful.
thanks for this tour and all you share, including bits of the history of things (like the glider).
kathy
You’re most welcome, Kathy!
Thank you!
Stay safe.
So pretty! Do you ever have to deal with mosquitoes? We live in our screen porch in the cooler months but it’s too buggy in the summer.
Yes, we get them. Depends on how wet the spring and summer are. I’ve already been bit a few times.
Stay safe, Jen.
dear Claudia/Don — thank you for sharing pixs of porch/yard, very pretty w/potted plants in bloom!! being a country girl, I really love porches!! as I said before, pixs give us a glimpse of your life — you all are real people!! hope you can enjoy this beautiful space till snow flies!!! Stay healthy/safe
There are a lot of pictures on this blog, Linda! 14 years worth!
So glad you liked them, Linda.
Stay safe.
I’ve always been intrigued with, and attracted to, big front porches; I’ve only had mini versions, and never anything enclosed or railed in. (We have some terrific Craftsman homes in our town, from like maybe 1915 or so, and they have the big wide front doors with the large front porches which are really almost a separate but open ‘room’ [as you describe]; love them!) With the house I grew up in, and where I live now, the trend in Southern Calif was to build/focus on the rear of the home, outdoor life here being consumed with cabanas and pools or outdoor backyard games like badminton and volleyball of the times (50s & 60s; the tropical themes were popular, with tiki torches and palm trees); because, of course, we have good weather year ’round and don’t have to go indoors. It’s said, I’ve read about it, that Southern Calif lost a lot of neighborhood ‘connection’/sense of ‘community’ when this happened, because people were rarely in the front of their houses, not seeing passersby, etc or watching the world go by, because their ‘world’ was at the rear of the home. Just walled off and private (and fencing-in was big/still is) in their own world and not of the larger world. I see this today in my neighborhood: People drive in, park the car or go directly into their garages; then you never see them again til they return to the car and leave. But I’m as much the fault as I don’t live in my front yard at all. I retreat to the rear, too, where I have a modest amount of lawn, all the plants and trees of our back hillside; it’s where the dog hangs out; it’s quiet, no street noise from cars, etc.
Your potted flowers are beautiful and your porch is just lovely, Claudia. It’s peaceful and you’re surrounded by green.
Refresh my memory; what’s in the basement? Is it finished or is it more like a cellar?
Mine in our 1923 small cottage only had exterior stairs and was finished for a bedroom/sitting area and full bath; but, thru a second door down there, it was all dirt and not usable. The people we sold to were going to try to figure out a way to have an interior stairwell to the finished part of the cellar but, in order to do that, they were going to have to really alter the formal dining room, which was my fave part of the whole house (floor-to-ceiling windows and French doors; amazing views of the city below and large oak trees shading it on one side; so pretty); so, I don’t know if they accomplished it other than that I learned they did tear out a wall and turn the formal dining room into a larger kitchen, which absolutely broke my heart because I’d also loved my nearly-original kitchen which had only been slightly remodeled in the 1930s. It had the original kitchen sink, which was in fine shape. The below-counter drawers lined in metal which had of course been for flour, etc. Tile counters which I personally love and prefer. (Calif-colorful ceramic tile. Some people hate cleaning grout between the tiles; I never minded it!)
I know that one of the reasons I started distancing myself from former neighbors is that I didn’t want to know one more thing of how these new people were changing the home’s footprint/blueprint, because it was perfectly designed by the original architect in the early 1920s and we’d tried so hard, my husband and I and the current architect and licensed contractor, to renovate (not ‘remodel’/modernize) and NOT change the original configuration. Reason was, I had a rare opportunity to be in/spend time in the emptied home, five months from when I inherited it to when the new work finally began. I had the time needed to let the house talk to me. Let it seep into my being and making the transition from when it had belonged to someone else in my family. I’d watch the light and where it fell at different times indoors; the direction of the breeze. I was a novice at any of this at the time, still am, but I could begin to see we needed to scrap a lot of the architectural plans because so much was exactly already the way it should be. I wish our buyers had been able to see and feel what I had experienced. One neighbor told me I’d like what they’d done; but, no, I will never go in that cottage again; I have to remember how it was in my family, not somebody else’s.
Sometimes I daydream, like if I won the lottery, of getting the house back and making it my own again; but there were reasons why we moved when we did; and, now, sadly, it’s in a bad zone for wildfire more than it ever was in the dry, drought-ridden Calif hills, as climate-change and the intensity/frequency now of our wildfires has created too much danger at that location. It was pure luck and prayer that the massive 2017 fire didn’t take the house, as fire burned to just two streets up; everybody had to evacuate for a week; a fire truck stayed on the neighboring street for many days afterward, just watching and waiting for a recurrence. I don’t have the nerves for it anymore.
Anyway, just wondered if your own basement there is for storage or, I seem to recall, you’ve got some kind of pump down there, no? I guess my husband and I were fortunate to never have our cellar flood; because we did, in the years we lived at this cottage, have some pretty-good rains (times when Southern Calif actually did get ‘regular’ rain in Dec-March of a year, unlike these days!).
The basement is very small, built in 1891. It is unusable for living. The sump pump, water heater, well pump and oil burner are down there. That’s it.
Our basement is called a ‘wet basement’ – water gets in between the stones in the foundation. That’s why we have a sump pump and a dehumidifier.
Interesting! I’ve never heard of a wet basement. Is there ever a problem with mold, or is that why you then have the dehumidifier?
Also, when you have a well, do you ever have to have that ‘checked out’ to make sure you’re not going dry? I have no idea how a well on a property works!
Between the snow pack every winter and all the rain we get, I don’t worry about our well going dry. It’s been here for years and years and is doing fine.
Yes, that’s why we have a dehumidifier.
xo
Our house in San Diego was a Craftsman, and it had french doors that opened out to the porch.
Stay safe, Vicki.
You know, over the years, when you speak of this from San Diego, you seem to mention the house with affection. It must have been a really nice little house for you and Don. Did you have the built-ins that are so common with a Craftsman, like maybe a built-in china hutch and bookcases? Little cubbies here and there? Wood floors of course! Working fireplace? Such solidly-built homes! I used to think they were kinda blocky and heavy but I have a better appreciation of a Craftsman nowadays; they were built to LAST.
Yes, it had a fireplace (non-working) with built in bookshelves with glass doors on either side. It had a huge built in sideboard in the dining room, with more glass bookshelves and big drawers for linen storage, with a lovely long mirror that ran along the back. We had plate rails all the way around the dining room. The kitchen had a huge built in hutch with lots of storage. One of the bedrooms had originally been a sleeping porch. It needed work, but it was a lovely house and we lived there for six years. Great neighbors, beautiful tree-lined street with lots of Craftsman houses.
Ah gee, it sounds WONDERFUL! Could have been from a Sears kit but probably was ‘custom’ with all the accoutrements you never found in houses after the late 1940s-onward, at least here in Southern Calif, although one of my aunt’s houses, custom-built quite modestly in 1949 with only one bathroom (tub, no shower!), DID have a small built-in that was a cosmetic counter with the little seat and lighted mirror that I really liked; fit ‘just right’ behind the bathroom door.
And she’d been a home-ec teacher who loved to cook, so she got a walk-in pantry that was so big that it could even hold a good-sized, bulky, ‘industrial’, horizontal-not-vertical second fridge; had a crank handle; you’d see these in grocery stores for bottled soft drinks like Coke. I’ll never forget all those shelves holding her pots and pans, so that you could lay them flat without nesting them. There was room inside this pantry to even put one of those bottled water stands; I remember when the delivery guy would come with those large ‘blue’ bottles to dump upside down over the unit.
But, other than that, a 2-bed/1-bath for a family of six? The kids were all born VERY close together (4 kids in less than 6 years; two were twins), so I guess it was four tots in one bedroom at the beginning, Mom & Dad in the other. Easy to see why they soon had to do some build-ons, which was a three-quarter bath, a teeny sewing room (again, home-ec teacher who loved to cook AND sew!) and a master bedroom for the adults. They took the garage for it and, thereafter, only had a carport.
I guess in the 50s otherwise, when trying to serve so many young, post-war families, a lot of corners had to be cut. No built-ins; just very, very basic housing. This ’50s house I’m in is a good, strong house but it is a tract-box. A plain box. Zero personality. Truly, the only thing that would really work for it, because I’ve seen some remodels, is indeed the mid-century ‘look’ in terms of furnishings/decor. And I am sometimes drawn to mid-century, but it’s not really me. Thus, anything else I do just doesn’t look right, so it makes me feel out of sorts. All of my ‘stuff’ is for former-century ‘vintage cottage’. Sigh.
I know we have to move on to recent posts now, but thanks for commenting back; I loved hearing about your San Diego Craftsman. Some day, in May-June of a year, I want to go to Pasadena in Southern Calif (where they hold the Rose Parade; it’s only a 90-minute drive for me; don’t know why I’ve never done it before), because the city has loads and loads of lush jacaranda trees on old streets just full of well-kept Craftsmans. (KCET/PBS-Los Angeles: The sixteen-block, turn-of-the-century neighborhood “Bungalow Heaven” in Pasadena is one of the most concentrated examples of craftsman architecture in America.)
It was a kit home, but not a Sears home. Somewhere I have the framed advertisement for it.
Your pictures are beautiful! We also always had a porch growing up but do not have one now. I really miss that. With all your coneflowers do you get a lot of Monarch butterflies? I know they are really common here to the people who plant them. I just have a few, but have seen monarchs once in awhile. Do you store anything in your basement? Love the glider too! Hope your allergies get better so you can spend more time outside. Thank you for the pictures. We always enjoy them. Take care!
We have milkweed growing wild on our property. In recent years it’s starting growing on the edges of the big garden beds. So we have monarchs that are born here. And yes, we see them after they emerge and they love the coneflowers.
We just have essentials in our basement: It gets damp down there, so nothing is stored there. It’s the area where the oil burner, hot water heater, dehumidifier, sump pump, Heating oil, and well pump live.
Stay safe, Deb.
Hi Claudia, I love your porch and everything on it….very comfy looking! I also love your basement entrance…. don’t have many of those here in California! When I was a kid I was always so intrigued by my grandparents attic and basement in Michigan…nice nostalgia!
It’s a very small room – unlivable. The water heater, sump pump, well pump, oil, oil burner and a dehumidifier are down there. You see basements like this all over this area.
Thanks, Barrie.
Stay safe.
So true; you do not see basements in California; only rarely, with the oldest houses. When people came west back in the day, they often built their homes to mimic what they’d had in the Midwest and Northeast. For those homes which survive today (easily one hundred years old now in our relatively-young West), there’s often a front porch of some type, a cellar/basement and a back porch (“service porch”) or even a screened-in ‘sleeping’ porch on the side. To me, it was a sort of ‘gracious’ living we’ve lost in the more-modern homes which followed!
What a wonderful spot to sit and read or just contemplate the world! I like the chippy, too! And the plants are going so well. I can see why that was a selling point for the house. It would be a big plus for me, too. The planters look great — I especially love the wire/iron one with the plants in it. I haven’t had a porch (like a not-screened-in porch in the front) maybe ever. I often sit and read in a corner of my driveway so I can commune with my neighbors, rather than the nice backyard, which is very sheltered. I’d love a porch like that!
It’s a slice of heaven, Jeanie.
Stay safe.
Thanks so much for the porch tour.What a slice of paradise! When my parents bought a home at the end of the second world War I was thrilled that we had a porch and a glider! Every home that I have lived in as an adult has had a porch.I am not a patio person!xo
I am not a patio person, either! I much prefer a porch.
Thanks so much, Annette.
Stay safe.
It’s all so lovely, Claudia!
We have a small front porch and a small backyard patio with containers of flowers on each. We really enjoy both. Although, our dog loves when we sit outside with her in the backyard that is fenced in, so she can run freely. She is a house dog, but loves to be outside as much as possible in the warmer weather. :)
Take care,
Lily
Our dogs used to love to be out on the porch with me. I miss that.
Thanks so much, Lily.
Stay safe.
It is late. Just finished watching the hearings……….what can I say??
Your flowers are so pretty. Always enjoy looking at them!! Take care.
The hearings were incredibly powerful. I write about them a bit in today’s post.
Stay safe, Chris.
Your porch is so welcoming! Something we always dreamed of and one of the first things we created on our house plan when we built the cottage. Love it so much and we spend as much time as we can out there, watching the sun dance through the trees and eventually set at the end of the day. I love how you’ve styled yours Claudia!
X Chy
Porches are wonderful, aren’t they? Thanks, Chy.
Stay safe.
Front porches are a great way to create a community. I wish I had one now. Every year your porch is a bit different. Always beautiful and interesting.
I have a picture of you and I playing Barbies on our front porch. I don’t know where it is, but if I find it, I’ll take a picture of it and send it to you.
xo
I would love that! I’m sure it will turn up someday.
I’ll keep an eye out for it.
xo