The Little Porch Touches

The whole, wrap-around porch thing was a huge selling point of this house. It's just fabulous! I really didn't even have a vision for it other than its mere existence when I ordered the house kit. But, a little internet surfing has filled in the blanks there! Hanging baskets, for starters, caught my eye, and I envision having some between posts at some point!

But, as I looked at the porch in real life and thought about hanging things from the ceiling, I was initially perplexed as to how to do that. One picture I've seen hangs plants from the gingerbread pieces between the posts. That's definitely a solid option, but my brain kept racing going from hanging plants in the Summer to sparkly lights in the Spring and Fall. And, let's not forget Christmas decorating possibilities!

So, I knew I needed ceiling hooks. And, they needed to be decently to scale. My solution?

Here's what I did:

I wanted hooks in the middle of each post. So, the first, most important thing I did was to measure that distance, between each, individually with its piece of gingerbread in place. That way, I could see if the true middle point of the ceiling piece hit the middle of the gingerbread. With things pieced together at angles, I thought there might be a few, tiny adjustments that, if not caught, would look like big, huge, misplaced, who was drunk when hanging those plants eye sores. So, I measured.

And, as I suspected, not that I really knew the outcome, the measurements around were not exact. An eight of an inch less here, in between 5 and 6 eighths there ... Yup. Almost all of them needed just a little tweak. And, since I thought about it ahead of time, this was no big deal. (And, yes, those are real numbers that actually mean something to me. Like, that's "four and a quarter inches minus 2 eighths" that you see up there. It's about getting down on paper what makes sense, not what's mathematically solved.)

Not only did I measure between, but I remembered to measure inward so the hooks would all be aligned. God bless the day my high school graphic design teacher required us to buy a pica ruler:

Clearly, one side is no longer useful for
drawing a straight line ...

Never mind any lesson I could give about what a pica is (are they even used to measure anymore?!). I love this thing. You can see your work through the ruler, so it's like having a piece of graph paper on top of your work to align things. It's one of my very favorite tools ever in the history of using tools!

Anyway, I figured out which guideline to use for the inward placement and followed my scribbled post-its to find the perfect spot. There, I stuck in a push pin. This wood is easy to penetrate to a point. Using a hammer to tap it in made the job easier. And, more satisfying.

I wiggled the push pin around just enough to make room for both the wire and the glue, and then I removed it.

For the hooks, I cut the fancy end off of the earring thingy and straightened out the other.

From there, I tested the hole with the hook to see how much of the straightened end I needed to cut. You can guess that not all of the holes were the same depth. But, I didn't get too crazy worrying about it being exact-exact. Just visually close. Once I was satisfied, I dipped the straight end of the hook into a bit of glue -- that you can see on my post-it above ... such a versatile product, the post-it ... -- and put it in the hole.

Hook at the top; push pin awaiting removal
at the bottom for the next hole!

The glue pooled just a little around the base of the hook, but they dried completely clear. Booyah ...

I put hooks in between every post, but I also put them behind the posts on either side of the front door and on the very back of the porch. That way, I can swag something fun in those places! I let this dry overnight facing up so the glue would settle down in the hole as much as possible.

So, here's how it looked this morning when we glued the base of the roof on to the posts and put up the gingerbread pieces:

And, wait ... for ... it ... Here's how it looks with some tiny LEDs strung on the hooks!

I just want to go curl up in the gazebo! CAN YOU IMAGINE THE OPTIONS FOR CHRISTMAS LIGHTING?!

Next step -- We go up a flight so I can build the railings for the gable rooftop access while Aaron strategizes how to assemble the porch and gazebo roofs. This is really coming together!!