BEFORE THE ARCHITECT – Mrs. AG's House Designs AND HOME BUILDING PLAN DESIGNS
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MRS. AG'S HOUSE DESIGN PICTURES
PORCH DESIGNS
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INTRODUCTION
There once was this screened porch at the backside of a very old colonial house of ours, a porch in dire need of our porch designs. And the porch lacked life, luster. When the house was a creamery, before the turn of the last century, very likely this is where field hands changed clothes before entering the creamery with boots piled up and dirty overalls hung on wall hooks. But nowadays, the porch was almost in the way it functioned so poorly with the rest of the house. As our house became more and more appealing from our house designs and home building plans, the more this porch looked lost.
What's more,
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Our porch opened inward to both family room and living room, |
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Our porch opened outward to a beautiful, raised, slate deck, and |
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Our porch had a view of a half-mile of open fields, then a small river, and gently sloped old hills beyond. |
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WHAT TO DO?
This is our old porch before we did much to it. You can see that a little work is underway already with a hint of what's to come, and surely you can see beyond that to the architectural vacuum of the structure itself. Its merit as an architectural palette within itself is that its rectilinear floor plan is adaptable. Its location on the other hand and its size do not lend freely to more than a rework of the functionally useful staging area that its been for a very long time.
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WHAT WE DID.
We remade the porch into a sitting room area, allowing maximum light and views, easy passage to and from major interior rooms - both family and living - and very open passage and full-wall view of the wonderful deck just outside our doors.
Note not only the picture windows, but also the flanking casements for ventilation, and with the other doors to this area open - screened to the slate deck, and newly widened to both family room and living room - even the hottest sun never stifled life indoors. This room has become an active, reliable adjunct to the rest of the house.
Also note with respect to the windows that the muntins help substantially to frame the views and set a stylistic tone to the area.
This is a view from the new sitting room to the slate deck outside. Note the delightful inclusion of the outside to those inside. It's almost seamless.
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For a sense of placement of this porch cum sitting room, we offer a partial view of the backside of this house with the new sitting room centered just off the deck on its right. For orientation, house structure to the right of the sitting room is the living room, to the left is the family room. Above is another new deck newly railed off the master bedroom to the right and the new master bath to the left.
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POSTSCRIPT
The toughest part of this job was opening the back wall of the living room to get a large section of the siting room (and the view and light beyond) into the core of the house. (The opening and the view of which I write is presented two pics up.) It took a steel flitch in a big, big header to satisfy us, our engineer, and our inspector.
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