The key elements of a good porch… exposed rafters, check… ipe flooring, check… rocking chair and hanging ferns, check… two great dogs… now you are talking!
There are a lot of variations that one can put into a porch and make it perfect. We’ve done our share of rough sawn oak for the flooring, it looks great outside of an old cabin, it’s very reasonably priced, and holds up amazingly well. In fact I can go back to cabins that I built twenty years ago and the flooring is still fine… aged… but still plenty strong and attractive. Be careful of tongue and groove flooring outside, they all seem to rot out quickly.
We’ve built plenty of porch ceilings that weren’t painted… and then on the other hand we’ve done some pretty fancy ceilings using bead board and painted sky blue for historic accuracy. It all comes down to keeping with the style of the home, that is if the home is rustic, or refined, or somewhere in between.
The key point I’d like to get across it that a porch is one of the greatest rooms you can have in house, don’t scrimp here… no concrete, no plastic… and make sure and make enough of it so that everyone can enjoy it. An eight foot porch is minimal, but be careful in making them larger… make sure that the porch looks good from an elevation perspective… think of a porch as the brim on baseball hat, too long of a brim will make the house look odd.
Originally posted 2015-01-13 14:20:02.