BEFORE THE ARCHITECT – Mrs. AG's Home Design AND HOME BUILDING PLAN DESIGNS

A MUST READ.  New, 1,006-page Home Designing & Home Building Best-Seller -"Home Design Standards-Home Building Standards" 3Q10

UN-PORCH DESIGN – SCREENED PORCH ENCLOSURE,

LIVING ROOM DESIGN

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We bought a contemporary house years back, and, along with a lot of other work, home designed and executed a screened porch enclosure.  Big that home was - about 6500 square feet plus guest house, 3-car garage, greenhouse, tennis court, and steel pool.  You might be wondering why we thought that a screened porch enclosure was the right thing to do when we already had all the other space enclosed.  Why?  Because it begged us to adapt the porch enclosure into a living room design

We're working with a side screened porch enclosure  You could see the porch from the turnaround driveway.  The porch was hog ugly.

Screened Porch Enclosures

We enclosed several porches in our time, because they had it coming.  Porches often share interesting, enclosure-motivating characteristics -

Directly off community spaces.

Good views.

Room for lots of windows.

Foundation's done (usually).

Roof's already there, along with the bones of a superstructure.

Rarely very small.

Before.

Here's a view from the backyard looking forward.

And another from the side yard looking at its butt end.

In our porch design, we had some opportunities and some obstacles. 

Opportunities -
 

Sound roof.

Obstacles -

During

We sealed off the slab-on-grade slate from moisture, framed up a sub-floor structure and vented it.  In the process, we evened up the elevations between the existing living room and the new space.

We contracted out to get the cedar siding milled.

We demolished the old screening, cut a big hole in the home so that the passage from existing to new living room design turned out about 12' wide (along the way, setting in a humongous header replacement), framed up the new walls, set the new windows and clad inside and out consistent with existing, and really enjoyed the outcome.

We home designed this new space as an extension to the existing living room - essentially, now, two living rooms, and provided two passageways (the big one, and a much smaller one) as means for traffic to circulate between room to room extension.

This pic is midway through our work.  You can already get a sense for the rightness of the home design, and the size and style of the structure.

This pic reminds me of why we don't work with Peachtree products anymore.  We did, once upon a time for home after home.  Then came this one.  That big hole in the backside of the screened porch enclosure took an oversized, 3-panel slider from Peachtree.  It didn't fit quite right.  Peachtree sent two goons out (who knew we'd been working Peachtree materials for years) to tell us how AG and I  must have screwed up something to make their door not work.  In the end, it was the door, not AG or me.  The door was racked in shipping, and easily repaired by releasing tension screws that hold the slider in place and then, after squaring, tightening up again.  We didn't know about those squaring screws, but the goons did.  They took their sweet time making fun of AG and me. Like lousy field mice, if you ask me.  Haven't worked with Peachtree products since.  No reason to start up again.  Almost as bad as Andersen for customer contact.

After

Finally, this pic is from the inside of the existing living room looking into the extension.  The thin-cut white oak floors are continuous and level between the two spaces.  A beautiful porch enclosure, indeed.

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