COB & ON: Carlton Screen Porch

Squash flowers! Danielle is trying a zucchini-staking method that she read about on a square-foot gardening website. We're trying to pack as much as we can into our small beds.

I've been doing a lot of work on the back deck, to convert it into a screened-in porch. The original plan was to have just a deck, and then we decided to put a roof on it, and now we have decided to screen it in. Needless to say, it isn't the easiest thing to screen in, with all of the angled shapes and big beams to work around. If I could have predicted that it would be a screen porch, I would have constructed it differently. However, it has quite a bit of character now. We've gotten really good feedback about it thus far. Cob and earthen plaster have come in very handy in filling the odd spaces.

The three main openings are tempered glass, that I ordered from a local glass shop. There is also a trapezoid of glass above the yellow door. Other than that, everything else is screen. The glass was strategically placed in areas where the most weather had been coming onto the deck. Now it stays very dry in the rain, even with all of the screens.

I had to come up with a clever way to screen in the top of the space. It would have been too complicated to screen between all of the rafters, and in all of the gabs between the plastic roofing and the purlins... too many complex cuts to make. Instead, I made these screens that screw up along the bottom of the rafters. They are removable for any cleaning/repairing purposes.

Here you can see Mike up on the roof, applying the finish lime plaster to the exterior of the building.

I applied lime to the street-side, above the red siding. It looks brown in this photo, but has since cured/dried to an off-white color.

You can see it drying here, looking mottled (I really like this look, I wish it stayed this way):

We also applied lime around the porch, so it now looks neat and clean.

This is closer to the finish color, but will still get whiter.

I installed a nice hanging light in the porch, so that we can get a table out there and have nice evening meals. I am trying to buy only lamps that direct light down, where you actually need it - not lamps that send light up into the sky, where it just becomes light pollution.

I had to dig into the wall to add on another switch for the new light.

There was already a switch on the opposite side of the wall (on the interior), and so I connected into it. Now you can turn on/off the porch light from inside or outside the door.

It used to be intimidating, but now I really enjoy cutting through the walls of the house. It's so interesting to think through how to adjust something without create a lot of damage and repair work.