The Continuing Saga of the (un)Screened Porch

So, on Saturday Jeff had this brilliant idea.

Let me start at the beginning. On Friday we were talking about staining the deck(s). We've been going back and forth about what color to use, and whether it should be solid or semi-transparent, etc. Part of the reason for this is that we don't like the railings. They're made from alternating 1x4's and 1x6's on the flat, with about 4" of space between them and they're just very rustic and camp-like and not at all our style. There are pictures somewhere in my old posts if you want to look. So anyway, we want to rebuild them, but it's really not at the top of our priority list right now. But staining the deck is, cause otherwise it's going to rot away. We like the colors our deck was on our old house (dark brown deck with white railings) but we can't really see those huge in-your-face railings being WHITE. And, of course, railings like that have so many darn surfaces that they take forever to paint. Anyway, we were out there Friday and realized that most of the deck is only 18"-24" off the ground, and you don't even NEED railings until you're 30" high (we won't mention the railing-less stair inside) so, we're going to take most of the railings right off and not stain them at all. We'll stain the remaining ones for now, and plan to rebuild them in the future.

So, back to saturday and the brilliant idea. The bottom and top of the screened porch are built in the same design as the deck railings (and therefore have 50 million little surfaces everywhere) and it is taking FOREVER to prime. Anyone who has never painted old, dry pressure treated lumber (especially in the shape of a porch) with icky, sticky oil-based primer just can't understand how miserable it is and how slow-going. So we're standing around out there, trying to get motivated to prime the last few bits, when Jeff says something to the effect of "Why don't we just cut all those flat boards out?"

**dead silence**

um, yeah, why not?

HELLO? WHY DIDN'T WE THINK OF THIS BEFORE PRIMING ALL BUT ABOUT 4 BOARDS??

It's funny, because all along neither of us has been crazy about the design of the porch, and once we talked about killing all those railings, I was even thinking about how much the porch REALLY wouldn't match once we rebuilt the rest of them. The problem for both of us, I think, is that when we thought about changing it we immediately thought "rebuild the screened porch" and that's just way too much project right now, with the bump and the kitchen looming. I for one never thought of just cutting out the part we don't like.




You can see from what's done in the photos that it's way more open this way. It's much brighter on the porch and in the kitchen, and you can see the blue ceiling from the deck without having to look for it. The whole thing also looks a lot taller, which is neat. We know there's a chance that little kids visiting could be a hazard to the screen on the bottom portion, but if it ends up being an issue, we'll probably just reinforce it with heavier-weight mesh. And even though we didn't save time priming it all, we're still saving the time it would take to put 2 coats of paint on, and we've done away with the little niches the bats like to sleep in too :oD