Front porches are the first thing visitors see when they enter your home, but even though they’re used by you and your family every single day, they’re so easily forgotten about. That’s exactly what happened with our porch after we lost the front door key and were using the side entrance during the major renovation works of our 1970s extension.
Determined to reinstate the area as our main entrance, but with dregs of a budget leftover (we tried to limit the spend to sub £150), my partner and I used scraps from other parts of the reno, plus a couple of new buys, to remodel our vestibule area with our favourite front porch ideas.
This is how we managed to keep the budget low and completely transform the existing look of our enclosed porch and narrow hallway ideas.
Image 1 of 2
1. I worked with materials we already had (~£20)
During the renovation, we had engineered oak flooring put down from The Solid Wood Flooring Company – it’s one of the best decisions we made. It runs throughout the ground floor of our home. Before the carpenters got to laying it, my partner had the ingenious idea of having a single line from the front door directly out to the new patio doors leading to our courtyard garden without door jambs or divides.
That means it runs through and integrates the porch into the rest of the layout, rather than it being a pokey afterthought. The impact of this throughline is unreal and by far better than the tiny black tiles that used to be on the floor of the porch, which I had admittedly grown to love/resent during our time at the house.
Even if we had not had any flooring left over from the rest of the house, I would have still found a way to allocate budget to this area – the sheer amount of traffic through a porch or hallway needs high-quality, durable flooring.
2. DIY-ed a shoe rack bench and coat hooks (£45)
There used to be a fairly manky bench with poor storage underneath along the side of the porch. We liked the idea, less so the execution, but we couldn’t afford anything new. So, we designed and built a new storage unit and put on our best haberdashery hats to make a long cushion for the top. We fell in love with the fabric from a local shop, and it was fairly simple to make using spray glue and a staple gun.
The storage base wood was sourced from our old roof, and the foam, fabric and ply for the cushion together cost around £25 as we were using so little of it.
Our coat rack was mustered up from an off-cut piece of wood and some repainted Dunelm hooks (they were originally blue, but against the pink, it looked like a bad Cath Kidson homage).
3. Painted the walls and woodwork (~£20)
The porch is incredibly dark without a window light in the door (a potential future project), so I continued the off-white I used in the main living areas of the house (White 06 by Lick to make the narrow hallway feel bigger.
I’m a big believer in having colour themes throughout interiors, so the woodwork was painted in Mizzle by Farrow and Ball (that is also on our windows and exterior) and the door itself in Studio Green by Farrow & Ball to match our mid-century-inspired room divider. The combination of pale blue-green and muddy, almost-black green works to add interest to an admittedly simple wall colour.
As we had used these colours elsewhere in the house, once again, they were the dregs of the tins, so they saved us yet more money.
4. Sourced new lighting (£60)
The previous owners had used an overhead pendant light on a chain that was incredibly menacing – I’m not a tall person, but even I ducked when coming in with the shopping. During the rewire I chose to switch to a wall light that sits above our coat hook.
Again, as the space is super dark, a multi-light design was essential, and I found this design from Lights.co.uk for a bargain. It picks up a cheeriness with the green, and the wash of light is much more appealing and is far less oppressive – especially with our low ceilings!
Transforming even a small room like a porch for £150 isn’t easy, but a few canny decisions and reusing leftover materials and paint can save alot of money.
Read the full article here