Screened Porch

We are back from our wonderful extended stay at shmoopywood. As you know, we intended on getting some of the porch framed and hoped to move the eventual process of screening in this porch up on our list of things to complete this summer. We have very limited time up there so alot of the work was completed last week. We basically designed the porch around this very cool door that we had found at the dump... yup thats right... the dump!
SO here is the "before" picture taken only mere moments before we began swinging our hammers.
(keep in mind, I never have built ANYTHING before hehe)

As you can see the door is already framed with some 2 x 4's. AFter this shot was taken, I was given the job of removing the nails from the newly removed 2 x 4's because it was framed in the wrong spot ;)






Proof that I actually built the railings!


I had forgotten to take the telephoto lens off the camera so in order to get this shot, I had to climb up the incline so my apologies if it is not the best. The perplexed look on Dave's face is a direct result of my meandering up the side of the mountain so I could get the whole porch in the shot instead of changing lenses. ;)








Dave then spent some time notching some beams in order to fit in for the new door jamb, You can see the notch in the top of the new beam in the above picture.
And a closer look.
I really think these extra touches are making a big difference in the quality of the job done. It may have taken us all day to complete but we really enjoy putting the extra effort into the work we do plus recycling building materials as much as possible.





















The challenge will be when we build the frames for the screen. The purpose behind making the porch this way was because it will be easier for us to replace WHEN the great danes wreck the screen. (notice the WHEN).








And our final picture for the progress on the porch demonstrates that even the most well thought out plan can go awry. We decided (at the last minute really) that we were going to build a fence off a portion of the porch so that we could have a safe place for our dogs as well as a visitors dogs. Not every dog can be as well behaved off lead as Django, and we wanted to be prepared for any guests that may want to get away from it all by coming out to our almost solar powered haven. So the big gap on the right side is left to fit the next salvaged door we locate hopefully this week.
In a later post, Iw ill show you what we do for "utilities" at this time and be more specific.

Another small project that I worked on a bit was removing the old fixtures (oh and sent them to the salvage yard to be recycled to someone else who may want to save them from a landfill)
The new fixtures were located on ebay. The tub was salvaged as well.