Tips for Building a Screened In Porch

Screened in Porches Are Back as Popular Features to Homes

In American about 75 years ago one of the most popular features of a nice home was to have a screened in porch. Air conditioning was not as prevalent at that time and having the screened in porch allowed the house to be open to the outdoors, helping to cool the entire home without allowing pesky or even dangerous insects entry. About fifty five years ago families in the USA began to get larger, due to the baby boom after world war two. Many screened in porches were enclosed to make more room in the home. This was also made possible as air conditioning spread and became more affordable.

Now families are tending to be smaller again and with the rising cost of electricity more and more families are looking to either re open that extra room or to enclose as a screened in porch the deck they built in the last ten or fifteen years.

Here are tips to building you're screened in porch, whether it is a new addition or morphing some existing part of your home. There are as many possible designs for screened in porch as there are home designs. These basic tips will help you make your project become a usable, beautiful, functional screened in porch.

Base Foundation
The first step is to identify what will be the base support for the porch. If you already have a deck or you are opening a portion of an existing area of your home this part of the job is pretty much done for you. For conversion of outdoor decking you must make sure that the support currently in place will support the weight of the walls and roof that will be built. You also will need to choose some type of sheeting to cover the deck since most likely there are cracks in the wood decking. You don't want insects to have access to the porch up from the bottom via the cracks in the old decking.