Front Porch painting in Portland Oregon

Does your house have a front porch? Maybe a back porch? A small side porch? Okay, you’re in the right place if you are looking for ideas regarding painting a porch!

Porches have come in and out of favor as additions to homes over the years. They also appear more frequently in warmer climates than in colder ones. They have always been great places to gather during good weather and they certainly add character to a home. In Portland, Eastmoreland, Irvington, and all the areas with turn-of-the-century homes you can find porches.

If you are fortunate enough to have one you know they do require maintenance. Unlike a deck, a porch generally has a roof over it and therefore it has a ceiling. It almost always has a railing around it and a set of columns to hold up the roof.

A basic “inventory” of a porch, as you consider painting one, consists of the railings and columns, the stairs leading up to it, the floor surface, and the ceiling. For the purpose of planning a repainting let’s break this down into vertical and horizontal surfaces.

The ceiling, the floor, and the stair treads are your horizontal surfaces. The railing posts and columns along with the stair risers are your vertical surfaces. You may also have latticework covering the front of the porch and that can be grouped in with the verticals.

As a general rule, the vertical surfaces tend to be painted the same color as your trim. If you have white window frames and a white frame around your front door then all of the verticals are likely already white. Is this a requirement? No, take the latticework, you could paint that the color of your house and keep the rest white. You can paint the columns the color of the house and the railing posts the color of the trim if you wanted. You have some flexibility but the general trend is to match the verticals to the trim because it’s neat and clean looking. This would also apply to the stair risers to be consistent.

The horizontal surfaces are another story, they are only seen up close generally. An exception might be when you have concrete or brick steps leading up to the porch, sometimes these are all painted (treads and risers) the same color.

The floor of your porch can be painted any color you like but the general trend is to paint it something either muted or complementary to the exterior paint color. You can’t go wrong painting a porch floor grey, tan, brown, maroon, navy blue, or any darker neutral shade you like. You can also match it to the color of the front door with a darker version of your door color. You can even match the floor to your shutter colors (you might not want to match with black, however).

You can also opt to stain the floor in transparent, semi-transparent, or colored stains and then go farther and stain the stair treads and railing cap the same. Since they are horizontal you are really talking about a floor coloring choice that doesn’t have to be in use anywhere else on your home’s exterior.

The general trend is to go a bit darker on the floor than anywhere else on your exterior. Since the surface is subject to some dirt, rain and outdoor film avoiding light colors helps mask any dirt that might collect.

For an added touch of personalization, and it’s on-trend, you can even paint a fake welcome mat or rug in front of the door if you are feeling creative.

The last horizontal surface to consider is the porch ceiling. The first two options you have are to paint the ceiling to match your home’s exterior color or to paint it to match your trim color if it’s white or a fairly light color. Keeping the ceiling a light color makes the porch feel much more open than putting a layer of dark color over your head.

You can also get creative here with a bit of color, it’s very common to see porch ceilings painted in a sky blue (often as a shade called “haint blue” down south in the US). You can also use other “sky” colors like an off white, a light yellow, etc. It’s really the only “ceiling” on your house where most people would even consider color so don’t feel you need to be timid and just paint it white because it’s a ceiling.

In summary, this is how you would want to break up your porch painting project into pieces to better enable you to make the right color choices for your home.

The actual painting of your porch once you have made your choices is quite a bit of work. What makes painting a porch difficult is the prep work involved. Normally exterior painting doesn’t involve sanding down everything as much as porch painting. The floor itself should be brought to bare wood and that can be done manually with an orbital sander or with a larger floor sander that you might use on interior wooden floors. It’s not uncommon to find a lot of rotten wood in need of replacement as well. Railing posts and columns tend to collect rainwater at their base and begin to rot if not carefully protected.

You are often better off leaving this project to the professionals who can make quick work of it and get the correct paint for the different areas that will be covered. If you are in the greater Portland area and are considering bringing your porch back to its prime why not give CertaPro Painters® of Portland, OR a call at 503-636-1809 or request a free estimate online here. We can have you sitting in your rocking chair sipping an ice tea and enjoying your newly repainted porch in no time.