3.20.2012

Porch: Demolition Complete & Brick Harvesting



The demolition on our porch is now complete and we’re quickly moving into the next phase. Let’s hope the weather holds for the week so we can get concrete poured and the masonry work can be finished, so we can get to the fun stuff. 



As we did in our renovation, we are reusing brick wherever possible. Our hope is that we can match the brick on the front half of the porch – basically patching in the front where the porch extends an additional three and a half feet beyond it’s current footprint.  The bricks are coming from the north end of the porch which will be covered by new masonry shortly. The workers are harvesting bricks from the side wherever possible so they can be reused. We even still had a few bricks leftover from our renovation which may or may not be used. We will likely have to do a new section of brick behind the fence line. It shouldn’t be noticeable because there won’t be any sightlines with the new and old brick showing in the same plane.

You may be wondering why we are extending the screen porch only 3.5 feet. That’s the most we could do under our existing zoning and we did not want to have to get a variance. We are going to be so close to the line that we are required by the County to get another survey done to ensure that our foundation does not extend too close to our neighbor’s property.  Our lot is only 7000 square feet (not a bad size for Arlington actually) so we have to maximize every inch!!

I have to say that the sun streaming into our living room is shocking. It’s amazing how much light a porch can block out and how dark it has made our living room.  We hope that replacing our shed roof with a peaked roof will help more sun to shine through. The skylight should also help but will not likely make as much of an impact inside as it will on the porch.


This picture gives you a little bit of an idea of how much darker it was before - notice I had every light on.



I’m already looking for a few new pieces of porch furniture to supplement what we already have.  I really want an indoor/outdoor feeling. I'm sure the curtains are going to go back up. I'm hoping I'll be able to use the same panels and rods I had before but fortunately all of them are from Ikea and still available so if i need to add to them, it won't be a problem.  Finding a table of the right dimensions may prove the trickiest part.  You can follow my shopping process on Pinterest!