our front porch project

We began this project to redo our front porch sur­round last year. It’s not totally fin­ished, but it’s at a point I thought I’d share it with you.

The house orig­i­nally came with an enclo­sure around the lit­tle front porch/patio area that made it feel like you were behind bars, doing time for a crime you didn’t com­mit. We took a saw to the orig­i­nal porch cover and pro­vided some breath­ing space in it, but it always felt like an uncom­fort­able retro­fit. As the ter­mites dealt a ter­mi­nal blow to the first enclo­sure, I devel­oped this com­pletely reworked design, sort of a decon­structed patio cover, with open­ings through the front screen­ing panel, as well as an open, incom­plete canopy overhead.

porch-cover-front

This shows the shel­ter from the front of the house. The big win­dow cut into the screen lets you see out into the neigh­bor­hood, while not mak­ing you feel caged.

porch-cover-front-angled

Another front view, approach­ing from the side of the house…

porch-cover-from-above

And a last shot from the roof, show­ing the par­tial cov­er­ing over­head. Many of days are over­cast, and we really would pre­fer sun over shade most days. This reduced cover shel­ters the big main win­dow and front door, but lets more light in than an edge-to-edge cover.

The new wood needs to sea­son just a lit­tle bit before the final fin­ish­ing, and the old wood will need to be scrubbed to clean it a bit. But once the fin­ish is on, it should really look great. I’m pleased!

Main mate­ri­als: pressure-treated lum­ber for the sup­port struc­ture (painted black, to fade into the back­ground); ipe hard­wood lum­ber for the slats; exposed stain­less steel screws for fas­ten­ing the slats. The ipe hard­wood is poten­tially the least green com­po­nent of this project. Although my local lum­ber sup­plier is assur­ing its users that their ipe “is har­vested from pro­fes­sion­ally man­aged sus­tain­able forests,” some of my research is now say­ing that the claim just may be a crock of green­wash­ing. Ugh.

Choos­ing sus­tain­able mate­ri­als for an out­door project is chal­leng­ing. There are inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions you can wade into, includ­ing an intro­duc­tory Sus­tain­able Deck­ing Solu­tions post that’s worth a look. If you must use ipe, a sup­plier like Altru­Woods can sup­ply FSC cer­ti­fied lum­ber for a project, and might have been the bet­ter choice for get­ting mate­ri­als for this project.

What­ever you do, reduc­ing the amount of mate­ri­als you use is a begin­ning. The post above rec­om­mends that “[o]ne green build­ing idea with a lot of merit is treat­ing wood as a lux­ury. Trees help the planet the most when they’re alive and glob­ally, the acreage per for­est is dwin­dling rapidly. Using wood as a com­mon struc­tural and out­door fin­ish mate­r­ial is not a long-term sus­tain­able prac­tice.” Good advice.

How do you all approach try­ing to be greener in your out­door projects? I sup­pose one excel­lent alter­na­tive to a patio cover would have been to plant a tree. It’s a con­cept our grand­par­ents would have signed on to…

April 01 2009 05:29 am | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: • • •

6 Responses to “our front porch project”

  1. susan (garden-chick) on 01 Apr 2009 at 3:54 pm #

    James, I love this! What an inno­v­a­tive way to high­light an entry. Very Cal­i­for­nia cool. You should send it to Sunset!

  2. Jenny on 01 Apr 2009 at 3:58 pm #

    I haven’t been to visit in a while appar­ently. I still have the men­tal image of the peri­win­kle, yel­low and red phase… I like this better!

    Plan­ning. It’s a con­cept I need to embrace, but I haven’t quite got­ten there yet.

  3. tina on 01 Apr 2009 at 7:05 pm #

    It looks very nice. For sure the par­tial shade/sun effect of the slats works quite well. Good job!

  4. lostlandscape on 02 Apr 2009 at 7:45 pm #

    Thanks, Susan. An aunt sent us Sun­set for years and I think some of the Sun­set look has stuck.

    Jenny, that must have been the late 80s/early 90s when the world was a much more col­or­ful place. The cur­rent project was way more exact­ing work than a few gal­lons of paint, and required a few more con­struc­tion chops than we had 20 years ago.

    Tina, thanks so much. You seem to have the best shade solu­tion of all–trees. Though it sounds like you might a cou­ple fewer so you could grow a few more plants.

  5. Pam/Digging on 03 Apr 2009 at 6:33 am #

    This *is* “Cal­i­for­nia cool,” as Susan wrote, and it’s a look that’s increas­ingly pop­ping up in cen­tral Austin neigh­bor­hoods as well. I love it. You did a great job. But what, no “before” pic­tures so we can really be wowed by the changes you made? :-)

  6. Jean on 03 Apr 2009 at 8:37 am #

    That’s a really nice look­ing struc­ture. I’ve always liked that style. I think you’re right on in reusing some ele­ments. That’s how I try to stay green in our out­door projects but I haven’t fig­ured out a green way to fin­ish off our back­yard fence.

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