Porch Projects

One kind of longer-term project we are working on is turning our back porch off the kitchen into a decent place to sit. Looks nice out here, right (if you sort of hold your hand up to cover the pile of stuff in the left corner)?



Currently, it has these mostly-non-functioning louvered jalousie windows, plus no screens and no working shades. This means, since the back of our house faces west, it turns into an oven in the afternoons. Throw a few mosquitos in there, and you have a room you want to pass through as quickly as possible from steamy summer outside to blissful AC inside. Not so much a place to eat some food off the grill or drink a beer and look at the sunset.

Not only are we missing screens and shades, but most of the jalousie mechanisms are missing their crank handles and aren't properly riveted together in all the right places. So, we've got our work cut out for us out here.



A couple of weekends ago we found some crank handles that will kind-of work at Community Forklift, a house supply surplus place out in Maryland. We got 10 for $.25. (It's the sort of place that's just this side of dumpster diving, so you know I like it.)



With luck, someone down at Frager's can find us some clips and build us some screens. With a little more luck, it won't cost us an arm and a leg.....fingers crossed.