Front Door Refresh

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday weekend! It’s been a while since I’ve been on the blog, but I thought I would dive back in with another post about my front door entryway. My outdoor Christmas decor was the most recent blog post, so an entryway update seems apropos.

After the Christmas and New Years holidays ended, I am sad to say my entryway went from decent to derelict. These “before” photos are slightly embarrassing, but they help put the “after” into perspective:

And there it is. Not good. Note the dead plants. These:

 

My entryway faces west, but it is completely covered. Because of the shade and my negligence when it comes to watering, I have come to accept the fact that I cannot grow live plants in the planters. I knew I needed artificial plants stat.

My original thought was to go with a topiary tree or fern, but then I came across these beautiful faux greenery balls in the Grandin Road catalog.

Upon closer inspection, however, I did not want to fork out the $100+ for each ball of plastic foliage. So imagine my excitement when I found these similar topiary balls at At Home for only $25 each:

Admittedly, these are not as pretty as the Grandin Road faux balls. But from a distance you cannot tell the difference. They fit perfectly in my Walmart Planters (and budget).

I thought it was a good time to update our nine-year-old entryway mat as well. I found a classic welcome mat at Walmart for under $15.

The final touch was this fun black and white rug from World Market. I’ve seen several other bloggers add cute buffalo check mats to their entryway around Halloween and scoured the internet for a similar rug. I found several cute rugs online, but they were all out of my price range.

I picked up my black and white World Market rug while it was on sale for $18. And after seeing it all together, I love it more than buffalo check. The material is the woven plastic as opposed to the jute-like material that you find on other indoor/outdoor rugs. I prefer this material for outdoor use because it holds up really well and cleans very easily. I’ve had one under my kids’ playhouse for about three years now, and it looks as good as new.

The greenery in the smaller pots is just faux grass that I salvaged from a thrift store planter.

So without further ado, here is my fresh, updated entryway:

Not a bad “after” to my sad “before.” Because I purchased most of the entryway items on sale, the total project cost was less than $100.

And that’s all for now! I hope everyone is staying well and sane during this crazy start to 2020. Thanks for checking out my blog. I plan to keep up with the posts more frequently, so stay tuned.