Design the Outdoors - Cozying Up Our Porch

Good morning! Today we are excited to be joining our partner, Joss and Main for their Design the Outdoors campaign! They are having a great outdoor sale right now and hosting a fun contest with the chance to win a $1000 gift card to Joss and Main!

Today we wanted to share our newest Joss and Main find – this outdoor sectional. We spend a lot of time out on our porch during the spring, summer and fall and wanted to have a cozier seating area to snuggle up on! We moved the sofa we had out here out to our outdoor fireplace area so we could use it how we did at our last house (and probably will eventually move the matching chairs out there as well) and then rearranged our porch so we could put the sectional out here. We chose this one because it went well with the existing pieces we already had out here and we have loved the additional seating it provides! I would keep in mind that the coloring is a bit darker than it appears online but it still worked well.

The sectional comes with a nice little table and we will be using that outdoors because we already had this round ottoman from Joss and Main that we love out here and it works perfectly with the sectional!

We get asked all the time about keeping furniture out on a porch and how it holds up, especially in the spring with all of the pollen. First, I would say it definitely helps by choosing pieces that are designed with the outdoors in mind. They are usually built to withstand a lot and that has proven true for the pieces we have chosen over the years. We do usually have one awful week each year where everything gets covered in pollen. Usually I try to bring in the pillows and any other textile inside and put it in the garage once it seems like that week is about to be upon us. Then when the worst of it is over we just wipe everything down and put all the pillows, throws and cushions back out. Other than that we just clean it like the do the rest of the house – dusting, vacuuming when needed, etc. We don’t usually do anything during regular rain or thunderstorms but once or twice a year if we are getting an extreme storm and know in advance that it is coming then we pull everything away from the screens towards the center or back of the space and then just push it all back to it’s place once the storm is over. Other than that we really just treat it like any other room in our home.

It makes such a great spot to sit outside and have some coffee…or dessert – ha!

You can see where we moved the table in this picture. We will have another post up later this week with more photos of that side of the porch.

I am going to eventually put some narrower but taller chairs here in this corner and will move these out to the outdoor fireplace area but until then I have them over in this corner even though the sizing isn’t quite right because we like having the additional seating.