Gingerbread Front Porch

Historically Inspired Home

My love of old homes started young. I have always admired the character and coziness that older homes give. Many of you know the story of our current home already, but for those of you who may be new around here (hi!), here’s a little backstory.

My home may look older, but it is actually a new build. When we were just babies ourselves, my sweet husband made me a promise that one day I would have the home of my dreams. (Isn’t he sweet?)

While Mark knew I loved these old homes he also knew he didn’t want to spend every minute of his life (and dollar in the bank account) on constant renovations and updates. He’s also a smart man! So, we decided to build new, but add in elements to make our home have the older architecture designs I loved. What we like to call, “historically inspired.”

How the Gingerbread Front Porch Came to Be

When we built our home in 2018, I had the porch brackets custom made after seeing them in a magazine. While I did love the finished brackets I always felt like the weren’t proportionally sized to our house. A few years later I had an idea to add “gingerbread” to make the scale of the brackets look more appropriate.

I had never created gingerbread before so I knew I needed to call in the big guns, my Dad. My Dad is amazing and I am convinced he can build anything. His skill has allowed me to add amazing updates to our home and the renovation homes we’ve worked on. We also have a lot of fun together just creating and hanging out together.

What is a Gingerbread Front Porch?

For those of you who may be new to term, “gingerbread” refers to the sawn or carved decorative trim work on the exterior of a home. While it is most commonly used on Victorian Style houses around there are actually a variety of styles. A quick Pinterest search will lead you to English Country, Spanish, Hamptons, Americana and even Modern styles.

In my opinion, one can never have too much gingerbread, no matter the style!

DIY Gingerbread Front Porch

The gingerbread really changed the whole look of the exterior of our home! I believe this would be a beautiful update to any home. Since we were able to do this ourselves, I thought I would share our process! You can definitely try this one at home, but you will some tools and help.

How to DIY a Gingerbread Porch

I’m going to do the best I can at translating how Dad created this gingerbread look for me. We communicate like we are from two different planets when it comes to projects we work on together. I end up drawing pictures for him every single time to make sure we are on the same page. It’s the funniest thing, but it always works out for us.

We used 2-in x 2 in x 10-ft pressure treated boards for this project. It took 3.5 boards per section. So, we ended up needing 25 pressure treated boards to complete this project.

First he cut two of the 10 ft boards down to 9 ft to run the post to post length. {You’ll have one that runs the length of the top and one for the bottom.} After cutting our top and bottom boards to size, we started working on the vertical spacers. I decided to make each spacer 6″ long and to leave 4-5″ between each spacer. This is where Dad starts speaking a language I’m not familiar with (mAtH…🤪). So, I take a step back and let him do his thing. For each section, to create the spacers we used 1.5 10 ft boards.

To make this much easier, assemble each section on the ground before attaching to your porch. We drilled pilot holes with an 1/8″ drill bit to reduce the risk of splitting our wood {This is my favorite drill}. We then used 1 1/2″ wood screws to assemble the vertical spacers on the top and the bottom. After Dad assembled everything, It was my turn to clock in.

I went back and filled in each screw hole with wood putty and painted over everything once it was dry so that none of those attachment points are visible. To hang the pieces, Dad used 2 1/2″ wood screws to attach at each end of the our sections and also in the center of each section. After attaching each section, we added those custom made porch brackets underneath {these brackets look so similar and very affordable}.

After attaching each section, we added those custom made porch brackets underneath {these brackets look so similar and very affordable}.

Enjoying the Porch!

I just love how it all turned out! Adding this trim made such a big difference to the look of our home. I love driving home and seeing how the gingerbread trim makes our house look so much more “historically inspired”! Do you love the look of gingerbread?