Screen Porch Start

Ok so I've been super-slack in posting lately. The main reason is due to me losing my camera, which has now been found and is quasi-en-route back to me (thank you Stovalls!) Not that I was the best photographer to begin with, but please bear with the iPhone pics in the meantime...

We have been busy planning what we are calling "Phase 2" of this never-ending labor of love. This essentially encompasses finishing everything that we'd like to do to the interior (mostly furnishings at this point) and more on the exterior (landscape, stone work, lighting, etc). (Phase 3 will be another year down the road, and will be the garage renovation...) The plan for Phase 2 is to start soon – once we get our final plans and budgets solidified. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, last week we started re-building our screen porch. We looked at a lot of ways that the wood framing could look, and finally decided to go with something clean and simple that mimicked the window layouts on other parts of our house (large square picture windows in the center of each side, with flanking smaller panels.)

The previous framing design, for those of you that haven't seen it, was anything but simple:
http://bashamhouseadventure.blogspot.com/p/pics-then-now_26.html

My dad generously offered to help us build this ourselves, so off to Lowe's we went to pick out wood. I learned the art of staring down the board to choose wood that is straightest - who would have known there was so much crooked wood out there?

We started with an empty slate, just the previous doorway has been kept intact:

On day 1, each board was measured for, cut, and placed down the exterior side and back of the porch:

On day 2, we moved to the interior, priming the parts of the boards that were facing inward and wouldn't be able to be touched by paint once they were nailed (this protects them from the elements):

The goal of the day was building up the interior trim so that it looks just as good from the inside as it does from the outside:

Here's where we stood at the end of the day today – one framed screen porch, 6 trips to Lowe's (it's hard to estimate all that wood exactly the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time apparently!) and 1 lost wallet at Lowe's – Mike's :(  We're hoping it will still turn up...

Our painter was scheduled for this week to everything painted, but we are anticipating rain so this may be delayed a bit.

We also are looking into new door options – I disliked the quality of the off-the shelf products so after much discussion, we are going to get this door custom made like the other doors in our house - actually, exactly like our other back doors, seen here from the inside in our kitchen:

Once we are through those last steps we just have to tack up the screen, and we're there. Let's hope it goes as smoothly as it seems!