Al Heavens is a Haddonfield, N.J.- based, nationally syndicated, home-improvement writer and author whose newspaper columns, magazine articles and books have been the first word on remodeling for 50 million readers for more than three decades. He is the author of What No One Ever Tells You About Renovating Your Home and Remodeling on The Money: Fifteen Innovative Projects Designed to Add Value to Your Home and was “The Gadgeteer” on Discovery Channel’s Home Matters program.
As more of us are being vaccinated against COVID-19 and the light at the end of the tunnel is growing brighter, I have an understandable urge to reacquaint myself with the outside world.
There is a deposit on a rental house in Maine for late summer, and my plan to spend six weeks in London later this year caring for my three grandchildren is pretty much a slam dunk.
This does not, of course, mean that my intimate relationship with my house, born of lockdown, is ending. What it does mean, however, is that I am looking for ways to take fuller advantage of what my house has to offer by making some long-delayed improvements.
Usually, winter is when we start thinking about summer and outdoor living, but the uncertainties of the pandemic postponed a lot of decisions normally made during that season. In this article, we will look at some outdoor options so you and your family can enjoy the summer weather.
For many, delays in decision-making have resulted in disappointment because many remodelers and builders are booked on jobs until late summer and early fall – meaning you may not get what you want until next year at the earliest. If you find a remodeler who is not busy, be wary. A carpenter friend of mine once observed that if a remodeler is advertising availability in May, there may be a bad reason for it.
Make haste slowly, or so the Roman Emperor Augustus is credited with saying. It is often better to wait for the best than settle for the worst.
That said, a top-notch remodeler who is not able to help you now may be willing to recommend someone who is both highly qualified and might have enough time to fit you into his or her schedule.
If you find someone tomorrow, you would still probably be pushing it to finish by Memorial Day, but from personal experience – the carpenter friend of mine – a May start might mean a deck, patio, porch, pergola, gazebo, or any other formal space for taking full advantage of the outdoors could be ready by July 4, even if your contractor is a one-person band.
Many of these structures come in kits that can be easily assembled by you, I suppose, but hiring a contractor to do the work will save time and, believe it or not, money (eliminating costly mistakes). In addition, a contractor will likely know what kinds of permits would be required, and his familiarity with building officials in your community would likely mean smooth sailing and a completion date close to projections.
For me, a pergola would be a nice addition to our patio. A neighbor has a nice one, and during my long walks on early summer mornings last year, I saw many fine examples – some with ceiling fans that kept diners cool and mosquitoes at bay during muggy evenings.
One pergola, tucked away in the rear yard of a rambling Victorian house in Collingswood, brought back a treasured childhood memory.
There was a structure we called the “grape house” in our backyard.
My grandfather had built it in 1914, shortly after he completed the house my parents and I shared with my aunt and uncle. It was a freestanding structure, near an outdoor oven/fireplace where my grandmother baked every morning for the neighbors (they would fashion dough into loaves, and, for a few cents, she would turn them into the crusty bread that accompanied the main afternoon meal).
The roof was covered with vines, which, in late summer and early autumn, would produce green and purple grapes that my grandfather would turn into homemade wine in an antique press in the cellar.
Although my grandfather died a dozen years before I was born, the grape house continued to be an important part of our lives from late spring through early fall. By then, the vines that he had cared for so carefully no longer produced grapes – a blessing because they would have attracted bees – but the grape house continued to serve as our dining room for the hottest days of the summer.
As I recall, we had the only grape house in the neighborhood, which surprises me now since every house in the village from which my grandparents — and just about every person in our neighborhood — had emigrated has one or so I discovered when I visited seven years ago.
Most of the roofs were shaded by ancient olive trees. The village was surrounded by vineyards, so there was no need to have grapes, and, therefore, bees close to the house.
The grape house was, of course, a pergola, but not built from a kit. It was tailored to something my grandfather needed – a place to grow wine grapes as well as a family gathering spot and work area.
Pergola, in Latin, means “porch,” but not in the modern sense. The pergola of late Roman times was an eave of the house wide enough to shelter a person or persons underneath it from the elements. The word for front porch in modern Italian – portico – means “hallway” in Latin, but a hallway could be within the interior or open to the air.
The pergola, or a similar structure, would increase the usability of our outdoor space. Right now, the fact that the sun beats down on the patio from mid-morning until sunset makes it unusable.
Last summer, with the uncertainty of the pandemic and trying to keep outside contact to a minimum, I took the L.L. Bean canopy we use to shelter the picnic table at campsites and stretched it over the patio dining table, hoping to use the resulting space as an outdoor office as well as a place to eat lunch and dinner.
It was tough to work there during the day with the sound of gas-powered leaf blowers interrupting cellphone conversations. In the evening, mosquitoes would drive us into the house, and the air conditioning.
The canopy did not cover the table fully in the rain.
A ceiling fan would likely help with mosquitoes and humidity in the pergola, but I would put up with the humidity if I could be free of itchy bites.
That means something with screening. I have been seriously considering screening in part of the front porch, but just in the summers. What those of us who have open-air front porches discovered in the depths of the pandemic last year is that the neighbors with closed-in porches were lusting after ours since it allowed us to get out of the confines of houses in which we were spending 24 hours a day.
What I envisioned was affixing sliding-door tracks to the floor and soffit between the columns and using unfinished screen doors and locking them into the tracks. When the outdoor season was over, the screen doors would be stored in the garage.
I would only enclose one side of the porch, then have a ceiling fan and light installed for summer evening use.
I am still looking into it, but the main question is would the amount of time we would use it justify the time, effort, and expense to design and build it? Would it alter the look of the house and require a permit – even if it isn’t technically a permanent structure?
Right now, the ceiling fan is on the electrician’s list. The neighbors who have them attest to its success in keeping away mosquitoes. I can almost guarantee that this screened-in porch – or half of the porch – idea will never see the light of day, however.
I may be overthinking this. In my travels last summer, I came across a house very much like my Arts and Crafts bungalow with a screened-porch enclosure made of what looked like curtains.
An Internet search came up with mosquitocurtains.com, which is touted as a “family project” (my wife asked if we could hire a family to do it, since the last time we tried to do a project together, the result was several days of silence).
Basically, you send the company the dimensions, and they send you everything you need (minus the other family to build it). My wife asked me for the address of the house I saw so she could check it out before we proceed.
The manufacturer contends that the cost of the mosquito screens (including sliding doors) is 25 percent that of a permanent screened-in porch, and I think that is probably reasonable for our purposes since we have a lot of repairs, replacements, and maintenance projects on our list.
Still, that takes nothing away from a permanent screened-in porch, a pergola, a gazebo, or any of the ideas you might have for taking full advantage of space for outdoor living.
The deck we had at our old house, which replaced a tumble-down porch, was well worth the money we paid to have it built. The house had no central air conditioning. Trying to eat in the dining room or kitchen when the outdoor temperature was nearing 100 degrees was horrific.
Having the deck off the kitchen – part of it had a roof and it was shaded from the evening sun by tall, ancient trees — made summer living possible.
While many of these ideas look expensive, most, especially the seasonal solutions, are not. The key here is to do the research, look for examples, and talk to a contractor about the best ways to meet your needs.
Make haste slowly…but not too slowly. A screened-in porch can be cold in the winter.
In our next article, we will discuss 2021 home trends to “keep the ghosts out.” We’ll explain exactly what that means and much more!