Two gallons of porch enamel sat on the kitchen table for three weeks before I opened them. Kevin finished the repair on June 4, school didn't end until the 25th, and I was not going to paint a floor by porch light after the spring art show and a week of packing up the art room. So the new fir boards waited, pale and a little raw next to the old ones, while I collected paint chips and argued with myself about brown.
The repair itself has its own post (four days, one rotted joist, $6,640). This one is the part I did myself: primer on the new boards, then two coats across the whole 208 square feet.
What the paint cost
Everything came from the paint store in town, and the receipt was $209:
- One gallon of exterior primer: $38
- Two gallons of Benjamin Moore porch and floor enamel, tinted a warm brown, at $72 each: $144
- Rollers, an extension pole, a 2-inch angled brush and painter's tape: $27
Like the repair, it came out of the house fund and not the garden budget, a distinction that matters a great deal to me and to nobody else in this family.
Kevin had primed every side of the new boards before he laid them, so the primer I rolled on Sunday, June 21, was a second layer over the 64 square feet of new wood, plus a few spots of bare fir where the old paint had worn through in the path from the steps to the screen door. The man at the paint store warned me that fresh fir drinks the first coat. He was right. The primer vanished into the new boards like water into a dry clay pot.
Choosing the brown
I spent more time on the color than on anything else. The old floor had faded unevenly over the years, darker under the bench where the sun never reaches and chalky everywhere else. I wanted something that would hide pollen and spilled potting soil, look right against the white columns and railing, and not show every paw print. Light colors show everything. Very dark brown gets hot enough in afternoon sun to make you hop.
The one I chose is a medium brown with a little red in it, close to the color of a terra cotta pot after a rain. At about seven in the evening, when the sun comes in low under the porch roof, the boards turn almost cinnamon. I'll admit I painted a scrap board in the garage first and carried it out to the porch at three different times of day before I committed.
Two coats, two very different mornings
On Friday the 26th I cleared the porch. That meant about two dozen pots, the rocker, the bench and a doormat that had been hiding years of grit. The pots went onto the front lawn in rows, and the house looked like it was having a yard sale. I swept, vacuumed the gaps between the boards, scrubbed the old paint with a brush and a bucket of soapy water, and let it dry.
Then I made my real mistake. I started the first coat at about one in the afternoon. Our porch faces southwest, and by two o'clock the sun was coming straight in under the roof and baking the boards. The paint started to set before I could keep a wet edge, and I ended up with faint lap marks across the middle of the floor where one pass dried before the next one met it.
For the second coat on Saturday the 27th, I started at 6:30 in the morning, while the floor was still in shade and cool under my bare feet. It went on smoothly and covered most of the lap marks. If I did it again, both coats would be morning coats.
Order matters on a porch with one door. I started against the house wall at the far end and backed toward the steps, so I never had to cross wet paint or trap myself in the front hall. Each coat took about two and a half hours with the roller on the pole, plus a slow half hour with the brush along the siding and around the column bases.
Staying off it, and Pim
I let the first coat dry overnight, longer than the label asked for, because June humidity makes everything slower. After the second coat we stayed off the floor entirely for a day, and now it's socks only. The pots and the rocker stay on the lawn until Saturday, a full week after the last coat.
The cat was the real project. Pim considers the porch his, and the screen door is the first place he goes every morning. On both painting days he was shut in our bedroom with his litter box, water, food and a pot of cat grass, and Mateo was in charge of keeping the screen door latched and sending everyone around to the back door. He made a sign for the front door in his comic style: a cat with crossed-out paw prints and WET PAINT in letters that dripped.
Pim yowled for most of Friday afternoon. There is not one paw print on the floor.
