Front Door Plant Pots

I spruced up my home exterior recently, but our front door although repainted looked lonely. And boring. I really wanted some artificial topiary trees but my bff hubby is adamantly against the idea. I have had pots and flowers by the front door before and in the summer when the 110+ degrees come scorching in it is a sad end to flowers and plants. It seems like the three options are no plants, dead plants, or artificial plants… really the latter is the lesser of the three evils don’t you think? I guess I have one more year to prove my theory to my husband, so I might as well do it in style.

I don’t often find anything great at our thrift store, maybe the town is too small, or we don’t donate enough, but Monday I was taking loads of stuff after cleaning out the garage and there were these two beauties in the yard:

Metal. Matching. What’s not to love? I claimed them on the spot. $5 later my bff was wondering why I donated a few boxes, yet brought more stuff home. I assured him they would be awesome when I was done. The hardest part of the project was deciding what spray paint to use. Until I realized our walls are two-toned, why should they have all the fun? I decided to paint blue on top and my favorite oil rubbed bronze on the bottom (I have used the bronze in many projects like this and this)

I cleaned, treated the rust, and spray painted blue, taped off the top and then covered with bronze. This is the first time I have used Valspar spray paint and I was not impressed. It was hard to push and didn’t seem to go on evenly. I can say though that the color was great and really true to the paint lid even after on the planters.

My favorite cheater trick from this project is stretching the good soil when planting… I usually don’t want to use really good soil to fill a pot when the roots just don’t go very deep (and it costs money, yuck.) I usually use any dirt I can find to use at the bottom and even fill the bottom with used plastic bottles, milk cartons, whatever, to take up space:

The front porch looks so much happier:

in part due to my awesome ever-present helper:

Happy Creating!