As fall is winding down and the frenzy of the holidays begins to wash over us, I wanted to take a moment to share how we decorated our porch for fall. I know a lot of people don’t switch over from fall and Thanksgiving decorations until after Thanksgiving, so if you are are a member of camp deck the halls after turkey day, this post is perfect for you!
Since this is our first home and we just moved in at the end of August, this is the first year I have been able to decorate a porch for the holidays. I have been dreaming about this day for years! As someone who loves hosting, entertaining, and generally having a house filled with people, I love that the porch is your first opportunity to invite and welcome guests into your home. And while we aren’t hosting as much as we did pre-pandemic, I still wanted to decorate the porch welcoming and festive for those that do come over.
The first item that I ordered was our welcome mat, duh! There were so many cute fall and Halloween themed mats, that it made choosing one difficult. Ultimately, I decided to go with a fall saying instead of a Halloween saying. I figured I could get more mileage out of it, since it can be out from Labor Day to Thanksgiving. Picking a quote was also hard; from seasonal puns to sassy sayings, there were so many cute options. I ended up ordering this Hey There Pumpkin mat from Etsy since I wanted to support a small business and I wanted something classic that I could see myself loving for many years. Here are some of my other favorites:
Since we are still lacking in landscaping, we tried to make up for it with tons of pretty mums. No yard, no problem! In additional to the mums, we stocked up on a bunch of pumpkins in all shapes, sizes, and colors. You really can’t go wrong with mums and pumpkins for fall. I tried to pick mums and pumpkins in shades of cream, orange, green, and grey to tie into the colors of our wreath on the door (old, similar here or here). A simple, unified color palette really helps ties the porch together. Another thing that helps tie the porch together is the matching black and white gingham rugs we used to anchor our seating area (here) as well as layer under the welcome mat (here). The last little touch was adding these bushel style baskets to hold our mums. This gives a fun rustic touch to the flowers while also brightening the otherwise black container they were planted in.
On a side note: how cute did our jack-o-lanterns turn out this year? It was so fun to carve them and we were so excited to finally have a place to display them on Halloween night. Kev and I definitely made a night of it; we watched Hocus Pocus, scooped all the seeds out and roasted them, decided on our cute designs, and enjoyed a few hard ciders too. It was nice to start a new tradition in our home.
Hopefully you enjoyed seeing how we decorated our porch for fall this first year in our home! If you missed how we decorated the back patio for fall, you can check that post out here.
xo, Ray