NEW HOUSE TEASER SCREENED IN PORCH

 Guess What?

We're going to have a screened in porch!

So, let's back up a bit.  The floor plan we started working off of had a rear porch.  We thought, oh, that's cool.  Then there was an option to make it bigger and covered.  OK, a covered porch will be nice.

Then we went to one of their homes under construction just to see how they build and the covered back porch on that one (not our floor plan) was in the process of being screened in. We walked out to it and even without the screens or door put in...

...this is what we saw.  And we LOVED it.  In fact, one of the owners of the company was there and 2nd Man told him, you should put this in EVERY model because everyone will want it, ha. 

Here is ours (bigger than the one above):

As you can see, it will be almost 20' wide and 10' deep. That's 200 square feet of wonderful screened in additional living space!

The ceiling will be 9' high, and we'll have a ceiling fan in the center, two recessed lights and two electrical outlets.  This will allow us to "furnish it" with lamps, a TV if we wanted, plug in our laptops, heck we could take our blender out there to make margaritas, ha!

The screen door will look like this:

We went back and forth on one thing though.  Did we want the walls inside here to be the house color?  Normally it would just be the house color since it is the back of the house.  But since it's enclosed and "separate" in a way, we can paint it a different color.  We were a bit worried that as a screened in area with a ceiling and walls, the barn red might be "too much" in a shady space.  We did some research and found that yes, there are concerns on porches with dark paint color houses.  One factor we didn't even think about is that you can see the color from inside your house and if your rooms are decorated differently, the red (in our case) can look out of place through the windows.  Plus, there were the valid concerns about darkness.  In the end, we decided to just do this inset part of the house plan in the white trim color...

Something like this...

Or this (minus the forested view, ha).

We just think it will give us clean lines and leave a sort of blank slate for decorating.  We will also keep the haint blue ceiling (same as the front porch) out here as well so that will be fun (blue sky!).

Speaking of decorating, we already have ideas...

This is our dining room table at the farm now.  It's solid wood and sealed.  We also have a slightly larger dining table at the apartment that we love, so we're going to keep them both.  We will put the bigger one inside the dining room of the new house and with our screened in porch, we can put this one out there!  That will allow us to have dinners out there or sit at the table to relax on a nice evening, play a game or I can even go sit out there to blog!

Speaking of repurposing furniture, here's another...

We have this piece in the kitchen out there now (this picture is from when we bought it years ago) and we won't have room for it in the new kitchen (with all the cabinets and counters).  However, we think it will be a perfect piece to put on the porch wall.  It is also solid wood (no particle board) and sealed as well.  It will be stylish and functional for keeping outdoor plates, cups and accessories handy.

This is the porch from our actual plan.  Notice how dark the porch is with that dark house color, yep, white is the correct choice, ha.

We will still have room for some chairs or outdoor couch of some sort but that can come later once we move in.  For now, we have to rethink what furniture we have that we can keep and repurpose, and these two pieces will be great on our new porch.  And remember, I've scored some fun stuff from downstairs to repurpose and I'm already thinking about those pieces too!