Curb appeal: Painting concrete porch stairs

Little by little, I’m still working on our house’s curb appeal. It’s a never ending project, really. I finish one thing, and then something else surfaces. There are large projects we still need to tackle like the front sidewalk, and nevermind that brown splotch of dead grass. We have these crazy two-foot-tall weeds that just will not go away. Had to bring out the weed killer.

But here’s a small project that I finished in two painting sessions of less than an hour each.

So now looking at the photos, some of you may not even realize what has transpired here. Sorry the before and after is not so dramatic, but this has been on my radar for quite some time. Our concrete porch stairs were a pre-made set of steps we got from a local manufacturer. We installed them three years ago when we repaired our concrete porch, but they’ve always looked detached. Like an add-on.

My goal always was to paint them the same color as the porch, and I finally (finally!) made time for that. I bought another gallon of paint in the same color (Valspar’s Mossy Aura in their non-skid concrete paint), cleaned off the stairs, and knocked it out.

I was planning to use a small roller, but ended up just painting the whole thing with a brush. There were a lot of edges and details and it didn’t make sense to dirty the roller for such a small surface area.

The paint said to wait 24 hours between coats (which I did), but I found in the heat and the sunlight, it dried a lot faster than expected. In fact, during the second coat, it started drying before my eyes and I couldn’t tell where I had painted and where I hadn’t.

Oh, hey, hello, dead weeds and cracked sidewalks. We still have a lot of to-do left on the to-do list. I hear the city is planning to re-do our street’s curbs and sidewalks this summer, so I am waiting to see how that goes before we start ripping into our front walk.

Want all the details on painting concrete?
Travel back in time three years to when I painted the porch >>

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