As I mentioned before, the front porch was enclosed sometime after 1913.  I really like the way the house looked without the glass enclosure but we certainly enjoy our enclosed front porch.  In the summer this is our main dining and entertaining space.  It is covered from the sun or rain.  There aren’t any nasty mosquitos or other flying things.  I close the windows and draw the drapes in the morning.  In the evening as it begins to cool down outside it is easy to open up the porch and cool it down pretty quickly.

The end that faces the driveway is the east side of the house.  The morning sun come in and it heats up pretty quickly.  To help eliminate that I looked for some nice outdoor curtains last year.  I ran into two problems.  How do you put up curtain rods on leaded glass windows that are in metal frames and how do I afford outdoor curtains.  I was shocked at how expensive they were!  My solution was Command hooks and shower curtains!

It works great to keep out the sun.  I was pretty set on painting the blue and green on the porch when we moved in but it is pretty low on the to do list so I decided to work with it instead of against it.  The blue and white  looked nice with the existing paint and I have decided to just embrace the nautical feel we seem to have going on.

We removed the chandeliers that were out on the porch.  They were pretty but we needed something with more light and some way of circulating the air.  We replaced them with these 72 inch fans that are controlled with a remote.  They certainly are not turn of the century fixtures but they do make the space more functional for us.  We packed up the chandeliers for now and plan to put them up in other parts of the house that currently have really bad 1960 flush mounted ceiling fixtures.

We have found we tend to all head out here for meals in the summer.  Breakfast, lunch and dinner are eaten here and the dining room table has mostly been used for folding laundry.  Youngest son spends most of his day out here.  He even brought out his hammock he got while on a mission trip to Guatemala  to try and put it up so he could sleep on the porch.  We might have to get a hammock stand.  He has the same problem I had with the curtains.  Hard to attach hooks on metal window frames or the solid block of the walls.

There were two old pews on the porch when we got here.  They were huge and ugly.  Matt gave away the larger one to someone he works with.  It was refurnished and looked beautiful.  Matt decided to keep the smaller one and do the same thing himself.  It came out great and adds some nice additional seating on the porch.

We are enjoying our “outdoor space.”  It is fun to look out at the park, watch all the people walk by and share a summertime supper or a cocktail with friends.