My Finished Front Porch Skirting (DIY Concrete Faux Stone Facade)

Here’s how it turned out…

So let me back up just a bit. In the last post about this project, I had gotten all of the faux stones attached to the concrete skirting area of the front porch. At that point, it looked like this…

I learned that as long as the mortar is inside the bag, the workable time is extended even further. I didn’t have any mortar set up and cure inside the bag. So the key was to add the mortar in one small section at a time, get that section cleaned up, and then move on to the next section. If I mortared too large of a section at a time, the mortar was much harder to clean up by the time I got to the end of that section. So as long as it was still in the bag, it remained workable for up to 25 minutes. That’s the longest amount of time it took me to get through one bag of mortar, so I’m not sure how much longer it would have remained workable inside the bag.

I also found that the mortar knife was less than useless for me. I’ll leave that to the pros. I ended up using my most useful tool — my fingers — to clean up the mortar lines. I had much more success with that than I did trying to use that mortar knife.

Here’s what it looked like after all of the spaces were mortared. Here’s the side of the porch…

And here’s the front of the porch…

I really wish I could have left it like this. I thought it looked great like this!

So here’s the new stone porch skirting in Mindful Gray (and without the editing to add the fascia board all the way across)…

I had planned to get the fascia boards finished and get this whole area cleaned up by the end of the day, but then I made the mistake of getting out my pressure washer to clean off the front porch steps and sidewalk. And once I get out the pressure washer, I may as well forget anything else I had planned for the day. Is there anything more satisfying than pressure washing? So instead of finishing the fascia boards and cleaning up the construction mess, I ended up pressure washing the whole front steps, the house foundation, and the entire sidewalk. 😀 But today is another day, and I WILL get these fascia boards done and get everything cleaned up.

Here’s the little section to the left of the front steps.

I seriously couldn’t be prouder of how this turned out. I don’t think anyone would ever guess that these “stones” aren’t original to the house. And yet, I made those from scratch!

I made the textured silicone mats. I built the molds. And I poured each and every “stone” from concrete.

Here’s a look at the porch skirting with the left side of the house. I absolutely love how this brings the stone over to the porch and ties the two sides together now. It looks like it was always meant to be this way.