I recently teamed up with Arhaus to collaborate and brainstorm with them on the subject of turning an outdoor space into an additional living space with the comfort and warmth of the indoors. This trend is growing everywhere as we seek to make porches, patios, and garden areas into secondary living rooms set right into nature.
If you know anything about houses in North Carolina you will know that living out the country almost always necessitates having a screened-in porch!! We already use our screened-porch as an additional room for entertaining, dining, storage, and a whole host of other things.
We are planning to have a screened-porch at our new house that we are building (getting closer to starting–yay!) and it will be significantly larger. Actually, it will be pretty huge. I’m so excited about the possibilities of turning this room into another space for dining, entertaining, lounging around, and as a place for growing some plants and a little bit of extra storage. We tend to host a good number of get-togethers with a lot of family and friends and we always need more seating for dinners. The porch will be our perfect party spot.
Below is a look at our porch from our 3D model of the new house. You will notice we did not include any screening or a porch door on this model so you just have to use your imagination.
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Rear elevation of 3D modeling of house, the porch is located at the center and right (imagine screening between those posts). There will also be a screened porch door and steps, as well as two windows on either side of the French doors that are missing from this rendering.
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Side elevation of 3D modeling of the house, the screened porch is to the far left.
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I’ve also drawn up a little sketch of my plans for our new porch using the current porch furniture we have as well as a few new things I hope to have (aka, getting my hubby to build me a super long farm table!).
We have already picked out a few of the details like fans and French doors but there is still much to be decided. Making a porch feel more like another living space requires that you fill and decorate the space with things you wouldn’t expect necessarily in an outdoor space. Things like:
-Pillows and throws
-Storage pieces (the one on our current porch is made from free wood pallets!)
-rugs
-light fixtures
-outdoor fireplace (not sure if this will ever happen, but hey, one can dream!)
I put together an inspiration board (see below) for my porch on Olioboard, to better see what everything will look like put together. I love rustic wood elements, a few of industrial accents, and styles that remind me I do indeed live on a farm and the screened porch will indeed get dirty 🙂
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