Patio Progress: Building a Pergola

On Monday I showed you all how we kicked down the walls (literally) of our "unique" patio (click here if you missed that), and today I want to show how we polished that up:

Yay! I am happy. What used to be such an eye-sore is now becoming pretty cute... and while it wasn't hard, it was a bit time consuming - most of which was painting the existing structure. I was NOT about to take it apart just to paint it! So up the ladder I went.  Let's see, on Monday we left off at this point:

 

...and today will be picture-palooza (don't say I didn't warn you!) of the finishing touches.  After kicking the walls down, tearing off the plastic ceiling, and realizing that this would actually be a fantastic pergola... the new goal was cute-ification, which only involved a lot of paint & 2x2's.   Here come the photos!

First things first, let's focus on this door!

A lot of people have red front doors.. and now so do we.  Can't help it, I love the look, I love bright red, and I think it's really making this look like a FRONT to our house of many doors.  Currently this door goes into a downstairs room with it's own bathroom. They called it a bedroom during the open house, but what "bedroom" do you know has a spiral staircase dropping right into it? Exactly.  But that's another day's story.. let's paint!

Rather than going down the rabbit hole of installing a new door hardware, we just taped off these "beauties" for now - someday? New door.  Hopefully something with windows to let the light in, or a dutch door!

That is Behr's Firecracker Red right there, and wow - it's RED.

Tah-dah! Progress already. That was simple and inspiring - which got us to painting the entire structure in a fresh coat of white. Actually, it's called "Crystal Cut" by Behr, and has the tiniest tint of pink/purple in it, because we had to play off our mauve-ish  house, which now looks grey.  Gotta love optical illusions.

 

Yum-Yum. So now the plan of action was to tackle the top.  It was a little boring, and to disguise this ex-enclosed-patio to look like a pergola, we added some simple 2x2's in the opposite direction. You can kind of see in that photo how we placed the plain ones up there to try them on before deciding, and it was good.  Enter, Mr. Miter saw - my new best friend:

Set to 45 degrees, we were ready to cut.  If you don't have a miter saw, these 2x2's would look fine in their natural square-end form on the top, I just wanted an excuse to use the saw...hehe...so I decided to angle the pretty much everything...

We went with 78" since the frame was pretty wide. It was just a convenient halfway point that I could cut ALL 16 of these to.. so many cuts...

Hooray for angles!

With the leftover wood, I cut a few pieces to later become corner braces - just some details to make it look like this whole structure was intentional, not to mention the added stability these provided:

Hello beautiful forest view back there...

Now time to paint. Tip: paint them before putting them up - it's just easier (unless you;re going to do some crazy spray action, then by all means.....).  We used exterior paint & primer in one, in Semi-Gloss to help resist some of the rain we get around here.  That Primer being in there saves so. much. time!

 

Alrighty! Once those are done it's as simple as measuring, placing & attaching. I started with long deck screws but found using long thin nails to be a little easier, plus they held it still so I could put a few deck screws in afterwards.

Halfway there!

DONE!  We moved our hanging planters down to frame the place...

Take a quick step back, look at all that new found light! 

What's that, an angel? No... it's our front patio...  Close up of the corners....

A few quick details added, like whitewashing this hanging pot (50\50 water to paint):

... and replacing that tiny gold wall fixture for a cute hanging lantern ($35, Amazon!):

I believe we have ourselves a front porch.

What do you think, big improvement? In the future.... more plants, a vine to the left of the door, probably a bench and some new brickwork or other flooring down there.... but for now? I'm so so SO happy with the results.  It wasn't even that expensive! Between the wood, paint, dump runs & fixtures, we're still sitting under $100... not to shabby at all.

Got any projects going on at your place that are changing your home's curb appeal? Think you might tackle a pergola project? I say do it - the results are so rewarding! Remember my sister & her boyfriend's pergola?

Read about it here..

Keep me in the loop via comments, facebook, email... whatever works :)
     -Jesse

Up Next: Let's make Concrete Firebowls

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• Patio Progress: Phase One
• Patio Progress: Demolition time
• 9 Space Saving Patio Planter Ideas
• Bamboo Fence & Patio