How to Decorate Your Porch
Accessorize your porch with objects that describe who you are.
Garage sale and flea market finds for your porch speak volumes about who you are and who you wish you were, and they say it for pennies!
Breezy Porches & Cool Drinks
More of us are staying home more of the time, and why not? It's hotter than blue blazes out there, and it costs three bucks a gallon to drive anywhere cooler. Those of us lucky enough to have a breezy screened porch enjoy sipping icy drinks while contemplating our porch collections. This is stuff carefully harvested for pennies at flea markets and yard sales that tells our visitors as much about what we wish to do as what we've done.
There's a world of difference between indoor and outdoor collecting. When you finally find the covered butter that rounds out your Limoges service for 12, you're willing to spend just about whatever it takes to get it home and into your china cabinet. Outdoor items however, must be durable and cheap, or available enough to be replaced with some frequency. Porch collectibles get rusty, dusty, and buggy, so you'll need to lower your cleanliness standards, or display them above eye level.
Emphasis on Color and Form
For porch objects, the emphasis should be on form and color rather than detail. A few years ago, I discovered vacuum flasks, otherwise known as thermoses as the perfect graphic statement for porch décor. The simple shapes are excellent for groupings, and they come in an almost unlimited variety of sizes and finishes. Until recently, they could be picked up by the armload at yard sales for twenty five or fifty cents apiece. In July of 2005, however, "Country Living Magazine" featured them as a hot collectible. They gave a brief and fascinating history of the vacuum flask, (glass liner perfected in 1911 and ubiquitous by 1945) and went on to assign values, noting that the larger size (approx fifteen inches tall) in ribbed aluminum with the original cup and stopper would sell for about $25. I don't know where the editors buy their thermoses, but I wish they would shop on my porch. They're still easy to find and inexpensive (except at sales in the yards of "Country Living" subscribers).
Decorating for Pennies
Probably the best thing about collecting for an outdoor space is that financial limits force you to expand your vision of what is decorative, and you end up buying and becoming attached to surprising objects. Based on my collections, first-time visitors would come away with the impression that I was a cross between Martha Stewart and Ernest Hemingway. On my porch, massed thermoses share shelf space with my collection of minnow buckets ($3-$10) and matte white pottery (.25-$2.00). I like the buckets because they're galvanized and have appealing graphics and great names like "Old Pal" done in faded red that matches their worn wooden bail handles. The pottery is on its last life-chipped, cracked and crazed, but in beautiful shapes and a delicious range of whites.
Tennis Racquets and Snow Shoes
My sportier side is conveyed via two pairs of wooden cross country skis with remnants of their leather bindings and decals. Although I'm not nearly old enough (or fit enough) to have engaged in cross country on six foot long skis, I have spent many happy hours on ski slopes. So many hours in fact, that my older brother often referred to my technique as poetry in motion, but I'm fairly certain that the poetry he meant was the kind that goes, "There was once a young Miss from Nantucket. . ." I'm sorry to have to admit that I AM old enough to have played tennis with the next item, a T.A Davis Imperial Deluxe wood racquet with the original grip (sweat stained). Rounding out the collection is a wood kayak paddle ($2) that clearly was never in the water. I passed on a harpoon, but entertain serious thoughts of old snow shoes
