Porch Renovation

So, I haven't posted in a LOOONG time and there's lots to update!  But this weekend, Kelly took the kids out of town so I could work on renovating our porch.  The porch clearly hasn't been dealt with in a long time - the floor was a disgusting, ancient carpet that was glued down, and the blue paint is peeling off the walls showing the former pink paint underneath.  Plus we'd been using it for storage so it was full of random stuff. 

Here's a pic after I got the random stuff out, while pulling the carpet:

So, I pulled carpet (easy) scraped up the loose carpet pad (ok) and then started working on the glue.  I started with an adhesive remover from Lowes, it was ok, but I didn't have anywhere near enough of it, and I didn't have a car to get back to Lowes to get more.  So I bummed a ride from a neighbor to Ace (smaller but closer hardware store) and they didn't really have an official adhesive remover so I ended up with mineral spirits and "goof off" which is really meant to be a spot remover, not something you use on a whole floor.  I used the mineral spirits on most of the floor, then scraped everything up while it was wet.  It worked ok, probably about as well as the pricey stuff from Lowes to be honest.  Then sanded with 40grit sandpaper and used my orbital sander with 80 grit paper. 

I've got all that done on about half the floor and I'm about 80% finished on the other half.  I'll post an "after" pic when I get through that.  Now I have to decide on a wall color because I want to paint the walls before the floor.   The floor will be a dark grey - this is the floor color up against the green i'm considering for the wall.

Here is the green against the window boxes (it will be very visible from outside).  The lowest one is my current favorite.

And against the wall it will go on.  

What do you think?