My Biggest Mistake in the Waco House Remodel

All remodeling projects have setbacks and mistakes. I wanted to share my biggest mistake in our Waco home remodeling project.

We all make mistakes. And I was pretty sure I would make one in the Waco house fixer upper remodel. I thought I was doing the right thing and since I had seen so many others on Instagram doing this it never occurred to me it was a bad idea. But this was, so far, my biggest mistake in the Waco home remodeling project.

my-biggest-mistake-in-the-waco-house-remodel

My Biggest Mistake in the Waco Home Remodeling Project

And what was my mistake?

Painting the porch floor white.

Mistakes in Home Remodeling

I know the porch looks great in this photo. I loved it after we painted it. Even if I had to clean it for an hour before I took this photo. 

I need to mention when we took these photos for the curb appeal reveal of the home, the painter only painted the porch floor white in the front. The remaining 3/4 of the porch floor (the side and back) had not been painted.

Thank heavens.

The following day, when all of the photos were posted on my blog and I was very happy, I showed up at the house and it was raining. The workers were already in the home and this photo below is what the front porch looked like.

I started to panic.

I knew I had made a really bad decision in my home remodeling project.

A few feet to the left was where the porch floor hadn’t been painted. It looked just fine. Because the dirt didn’t show on the non-painted floor.

Most of you know this home was going to be used as a short-term rental. It suddenly occurred to me that every time the cleaning crew cleaned our house there would be at least an hour required to clean the porch too. Ugh.

This was a huge problem.

I was told by a few friends that I could just paint the porch floor grey. But I didn’t want a grey porch floor. 

I talked it over with my contractor and we decided to pull up the floorboards that had been painted white. 

This was a mid-sizes home remodeling error.

It was costly to redo. But long term made sense.

I guess this was the classic “two steps forward and three steps backward”. Here is my poor front porch with all of the white-painted boards removed.

The good news was, most of the boards could just be flipped. This actually made me smile. A silver lining to my home remodeling mistake!

Here is the porch after the mistake was fixed and the boards were flipped. Some of the boards (under the posts) couldn’t be removed and still need sanding.

But the change saved me a ton of headache and cost to clean the porch multiple times every single week. (Not making the change would have been an even bigger mistake in the Waco home remodel.)

The top boards on the front stairs had to be replaced too. And in the photo below, you can see that the boards still have to be cut across the front (they look a bit uneven).

But the side and back porch floors were never painted so the “fix” wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Look how amazing the porch looks now!

Would You Like to Stay at Our Waco Home?

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Our Waco home is a three-bedroom, two-bath short-term rental and is located one mile from Baylor and the Magnolia Silos.

Click here for Rental Information.

Painting the Porch Ceiling Blue

The one question I get asked the most about our porch is “What color is the ceiling paint?”.

Here is the answer.

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Here are all of the details for Waco porch items!

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