By Brian Simkins
Your open porch, patio, or deck is a great place to spend time relaxing with your family and friends. Unfortunately, it can only be used when the weather is cooperating. Have you ever had to change barbecue or dinner party plans because the rain forced you to move the production inside?There are several benefits that come from enclosing your porch, patio or deck. While protection from inclement weather would probably rank at the top of many homeowners' list of reasons, there are others. Have mosquitoes ever chased you inside on an otherwise beautiful summer night? A screened porch eliminates the bug factor, and a porch that is framed in and has windows installed can, with a little extra work and expense, become an all season room. This is a quick way for you to add useable square footage to the living space of your home.
Designing Your Outdoor Room
The first step is to develop a plan. Sit down with a sheet of paper and make a rough sketch of what you want the enclosure to look like. Then begin to think through some details as you draw it. Some questions to keep in mind are: Do you want a screened in porch or a weather-tight room with windows? What do you want to do for a roof? Will it be a simple angled roof that just butts up to the side of the house or do you want to make it look a little nicer and fashion a hipped roof?
If you are going to close it in completely, start thinking about windows and what style you think you want. Do you want a lot of glass? If you just want to screen it in, what kind of supports do you want to use for the roof? You can frame in rough, open walls that will be finished with screen, or you can use decorative columns for support. Utilize this step as a time to dream. Draw several different pictures and use them to decide exactly how you want to use your space and how you want it to look.
Framing and Structure. The way you frame the walls of your enclosure will be determined by the style of roof you choose. Unless you are comfortable with planning load distribution, it is a good idea to have an architect draw this up for you. This is especially important if you live in an area that gets a lot of snow in the winter. Wet snow is very heavy and can send an improperly supported roof crashing down in a hurry.
Roofing. As far as choosing the actual roofing material is concerned, you probably just want to use whatever is on the rest of your house. It shouldn't be hard to find shingles that match what you already have. If you have steel roofing, which is more common in Northern climates, you will want to make sure that it is from the same manufacturer as the rest of the house. The rib patterns in these panels tend to be unique to the manufacturer and you won't get a uniform appearance if you choose to use a different brand.
Walls and Screening. When planning the walls themselves, screening is a much easier and more cost effective way to go. Screening can be purchased in rolls, which will allow you to cut to size the pieces that you need right on the job site. Simply cut out the pieces that you need and use a staple gun to tack them into place. You can then come back with some simple pieces of trim or quarter round and cover the edges. This will provide your new space with a clean finished look.
As I mentioned above, it is possible to frame complete walls. They can be insulated and finished on the inside to create an additional all season living space. If you think that you might want to pursue this option, know that you will also have to determine how you want to finish the outside of the room as well. Is the rest of your house brick? Does it have vinyl siding? Will the porch need soffit and fascia as well? All of these things are expenses that you need to account for as you make your plan.
Flooring. Perhaps the most difficult part of making your existing porch into an all season room is insulating the floor. If your porch is simple a concrete slab that is poured directly onto the ground, then you don't have much to worry about, but if it is a deck that is built up off the ground, then you need to develop a plan for insulating and weatherproofing this as well. It is possible to insulate and close off an existing deck floor, but it requires some tedious work and you should go into it knowing that the floor of your new room will not be as efficient as the floors in the rest of the house.
This is a project that will take a little bit of construction know how, but it is certainly one that can be done with the help of a few handy friends. The most important thing is to make a good plan and stick with it. This will ensure that you finish with a structurally sound enclosure and that you remain on budget. Grab a piece of paper and start sketching. A new and improved outdoor living space may be more realistic than you think.
.
Questions of a Do It Yourself nature should be submitted to our
"