Before & After: A Porch Story
How (and why) I made the porch my favorite place in the house.
I became a bonafide porch person when I moved to North Carolina. My grandparents always added lovely porches on their houses—gracious, full-sized living and dining spaces with screens for the spring and summer, and glass for the winter. Between that and the movie houses of the 1990s, the thought of having something slightly similar was a pipe dream to me. In New York City, I had a rooftop deck and the parks, and in Ohio I had patios. All great in their own right, but did not deliver the same level of effortless indoor/outdoor living and that rare hint of unproblematic Southern charm.
A Craftsman rental, my first North Carolina house had a wide covered front porch that I turned into something of an outdoor living room. It wasn’t screened, which made mosquitos and stray cats lying on my furniture kind of a drag, but you could almost always find me out there reading, doodling, or just breathing.
Only blocks from said rental, I found my new house while out on a walk. I didn’t intend to buy anything for a while, but I really missed working on a space and being able to make it my own. In this case, things just worked out. The house was miraculously within budget (a rare find in the neighborhood) meaning there would be wiggle room to make some changes before move-in. After seeing it twice, I had to jump on it. The closing happened a week or so after my 40th birthday. Perfect. And then I had to figure out how to get work done on an house, and I gave myself 3 months to do the essentials.
You know what’s not essential? Renovating a porch. It’s something I could have waited to work on, but it was one of the first things I really wanted to do. I am a porch person! I loved its slate floors, and was unbothered about the walls and ceiling, but the prior owners installed louvered windows in the 90s that were beyond broken and crumbling. There were no screens, and the soffit hung down over the front… Choices were made.
Here’s what I did…
