Cozy Fall Porch

If you’ve followed this blog for longer than a day, you probably already know that “cozy” doesn’t come easily in our house.

The builders of our suburban cookie cutter subdivision somehow left that little feature out of the plan. We’ve come a long way in a year and a half, but our porch usually doesn’t get as much love as the inside.

This is how our porch looked a year ago:

So I set out to cozify our porch over the weekend. (Yep. That’s totally a word.)

We had our first cool, crisp day here in the Carolinas yesterday, so it felt so right to bust out some hot cider and warm throws. And it seemed like a great time to welcome fall with a giveaway too! Stay tuned for more details on that at the end of this post.

I wish I could tell you that I curled up on our settee and read for hours, but motherhood calls most of the time around here. I’ve found myself wanting about 5 more of that plaid throw I picked up at Ikea.

Robert and I found our wicker set for a bargain at our neighborhood thrift store last year, and I love the bit of Southern charm it adds to our little builder grade porch.

My mother-in-law actually made these scrap wood pumpkins a few weeks ago. Aren’t they awesome!? That took major skills!

I’ve stuck to mostly neutrals for the inside of our house, but I couldn’t resist a bit of orange out here. It’s normally my least favorite color, but there’s just something about fall that completely changes my perspective on it for a couple of months.

In case you’re wondering, those pumpkins are most definitely fake. We’ll pick out the real deal ones in a few weeks for our pumpkin carving party that we have every year. We sit around a campfire in my in-laws’ backyard, play country music, sip cider from our favorite local orchard, and laugh all night long. We make it a contest to see who comes up with the most creative jack-0-lantern carving.

I’ll be sharing more details later about those wooden shutters Robert and I built to add a bit of rustic around our door. No space is complete without a little bit of wood grain.

And I’m so excited about this beautiful fall wreath that I was provided by Two Inspire You on Etsy. I love DIYing things, but I could have never made one like this.

I love the wildness of it, if that even makes any sense.

It definitely gives some much needed personality to our basic steel door.

I get questions sometimes asking what paint color is on our front door, and I wish I had the answer. It was what our builder chose in our house’s package. All of the Doctor Who fans out there have deemed it Tardis blue.

So now that the slight cool fall breeze is back for a little visit, I so hope I can make it out here for a morning read and a pumpkin spice latte.

And read some Edgar Allan Poe for old times’ sake.

But, honestly, I’ll probably put old Edgar away for some J.K. Rowling re-reads instead.

Sorry, Edgar. It’s me, not you.

After teaching close to a thousand students collectively in literature classes, you start to build a love/hate relationship with some of the authors. (Although, Shakespeare will always have a part of my heart.)

So have y’all busted out the fall decor yet? Is the fall weather creeping in where you live? Even if it still feels like mid-summer, we can just pretend until it really arrives.