Beautifying my porch for less

I would love to have a yard. Sigh. Unfortunately, where I live there are not many options for house rentals. So we are living in an apartment now and will be for the foreseeable future (because we do not believe in getting a mortgage).

So, here we are, with a small porch as our only "yard". I decided I was going to make our porch a nice place to be this summer, and I like to think I somewhat succeeded. My husband and I now make an effort to eat all our meals out there to enjoy the fresh air and warm weather.

I do not like to spend money, especially on temporary projects like this. So I did what I have trained myself to do: plan ahead and look for the best opportunities to buy.

I found these pots on sale at Jo-Ann fabrics for 60% off. I also had coupons and got them for even less. They aren't super fancy, but they will do for now.

For the flowers I found a Groupon for a local nursery. I paid $15 for the Groupon and redeemed it for $30 worth of flowers. After buying all the flowers on the tray you see here I only paid $21 dollars for $36 worth of flowers. Not bad! The nursery also had very beautiful flowers, and the largest begonias I've ever seen! I had to use shade flowers for the porch, so I just got a simple variety of impatiens and begonias.

I planted the flowers about 3 weeks ago and this is the result:

My table set is a Craigslist find which I got last summer as part of a group purchase. I got the table, a gorgeous cedar chest, and 2 wood bookshelves for $200.

The BIGGEST begonias on the planet. They've just kept getting bigger since I bought them at the nursery.

These pretty impatiens were small and now they are exploding out of the pot. I got the bug candle on clearance at the grocery store.

Have you ever seen a begonia this big? It's obnoxious!

 Yesterday I went to the dollar store and bought a clothes line and some clothes pins. I had my husband put it up today for me, and I made it so I can take it down and put it back up whenever I want.

I took some old wire hangers and bent them so they will stay on the line. I love air-drying my clothes. It saves so much money because I save electricity for not running the dryer and for not running the air conditioning more due to the dryer heating up the apartment. But one annoying part of air drying clothes is the wrinkles, which means you can end up doing lots of ironing. So I like to hang up all the shirts when they are wet, and then I don't have to worry about wrinkles or lines from the clothes line. If the clothing is ultra wrinkled still, just a quick 5 minute toss in the dryer when they are dry takes care of the problem.