Where I live (New England), there are lots of old houses (I’m talking 100-150 years). Most of them have a strange feature-the front porch has usually been closed in with windows and a storm door. Why do people do this? The front porch is an arifact of the 19th century-in the days before airconditioning and TV, folks wold sit out on the porch after dinner, enjoying the cool evening air, and chatting.
Now, all of this isn’t done…so what people did was to close in the porch with windows and a door. Now you have a pretty seless room-unheated, and small. Plus, doing this makes the livingroom dark, and the window facing the porch gets less light.
Our house has this…these “mud rooms” seem to attract a lot of junk.
I can’t speak for New England, but what you describe sounds a lot like similar porches in the Midwest. Sometimes the porches were originally screened-in, for summer use only, then were more enclosed to make them useful for 3 or 4 seasons.
But there’s a trend of making a “sunroom” on a new construction that’s very similar to an enclosed porch. It is a room, often open on 3 sides with copious windowage, and sometimes thrust out of the house profile. It may have a skylight. The whole idea is to “let the sunshine in,” and may not be intended to be used year-round, but practical for at least all seasons except winter (because heating it to room temperature may be costly). Such a sunroom is a welcome selling point for a house.
It helps keep out the cold when you open the door (like an airlock). It also serves as a mudroom so you can take off your shoes.
My house has a porch that was enclosed sometime after the house was built. I’m not certain why it was enclosed, as it was done before I bought the house, but I can think of a couple of possible reasons.
1 It provides a buffer zone between the outside and the living room , which might lower heating and a/c costs, since the heated/cooled part of the house is not right up against the outside. Even if doesn’t lower costs, it does get rid of the cold air rushing into the living room every time the front door is opened - that’s what happens in the houses that either haven’t enclosed the porch or the ones which removed the wall between the living room and the porch.
2 It provides a place to put coats, boots,snow shovels etc. We don’t have garages, so everyone goes in and out through the front door. Imagine Archie Bunker’s house without the closet. That’s what I would have if the porch hadn’t been enclosed. Houses where it hasn’t been enclosed tend to have an area for wet shoes and boots on the living room floor and coats are either kept in a closet further into the house or on a rack or hooks in the living room.
I’ve found a couple of other uses- it 's a good place to store items like soda, that I want to serve cold but don’t actually need refrigeration between Thanksgiving and New Years, when I don’t have extra room in the refrigerator. And I’m planning to put my fig tree on the porch in the winter because although it’s unheated, it’s much warmer than outside.
They do accumulate a lot of junk, though.
I built an enclosed patio in the back, off my living room. I had baseboard heaters installed and a ceiling fan. I use it as an all-season greenhouse . . . and the kitties love going out there, since they’re not allowed outside. If I had an enclosed front porch, I’d probably use it the same way.
I boxed mine in because the basement is bigger then the house and extended out as far as the porch. So the floor of the porch was a roof to the basement. We could never get it water-tight enough, especially since it is flat. Closing in the porch to keep out the snow and rain was the only option. It is still a perfectly good porch, and now I can sleep out there in the summer. It does not make the house warmer in the summer, which is good because I don’t have A/C. In a northern place like Detroit or New England, the winter airlock effect is nice.
There is a common perception that indoor square footage is more valuable than porch space. I think the truth is more the reverse, once you’ve got the indoor space you really need.
This is a great book about the history and culture of porches. If you have an enclosed porch, you’ll tear it open again.
No I won’t, it keeps the rain out. 
If your porch was getting much rain in, I imagine it was either poorly situated (facing into prevailing winds) or its eaves not nearly deep enough. I’ve stood at the outside edge of really good open porches in driving rainstorms and felt only the odd droplet.
My father’s childhood home had this feature, and Grandma Bodoni said that it was because the unheated front room kept the warmth mostly in the house and the cold mostly on the outside. We only went up there in the summers. I think that the family MIGHT have taken off their coats and boots in this room, but I don’t know.
A mud room, as I’ve always heard it, is a tiny bathroom with a sink and toilet, which is usually located by the back door. This bathroom is used when one is gardening, and going through the house to the main bathroom would track mud through the house, and also used to wash up after gardening or working on the car or whatever.
I know that porches are screened in to keep bugs out, but I don’t know anything about the ones who are fitted with windows. I’ve heard the theory that it makes them useful in all seasons, but I can’t ever recall seeing someone use a porch in the traditional fashion (to sit in and enjoy “the outdoors”) once it’s been windowed, so it seems to rob it of function rather than increase it.
Weird. That’s definitely not what people around here mean by a mud room: it’s an entryway room, often the windowed in porch that is the subject of this thread, at the front of the house where you abandon muddy things/winter clothes.
As a real estate agent, I have to tell you that sunrooms, which are essentially windowed porches, are all the rage. Step into a sunroom and the interior ambiance changes to near-exterior. It’s a little like a gazebo without leaving the house, and gazebos are common in upscale homes in the country.
porches are very nice. in northern climes they don’t get used for quite a few months of the year, so boxing them in does make a bit of sense.
rocking on a front porch is lovely, due to allergies and having a thing about creepy crawlys, enclosed is better.
My mother’s parents (as opposed to my father’s parents) had a porch with a roof and screened sides. This is in Texas, where our mosquitoes need to file flight plans because they are so big. They used to sit out on the porch in the evening, enjoying the cooler temp, and it was a good place to eat or entertain without the skeeters and flies bothering everyone. Also, it would have been an excellent place to barbecue, had Grandpa ever felt like doing so. Due to the Texas climate, this area was usable for about nine or ten months out of the year, and of course before they had AC, it was about the only way to beat the heat.
The house my grandfather grew up in (probably built around 1900) and my great-aunt lived in until she died in Wisconsin had this feature too. The house is gone now, but on the same street neighborhood there are a number of houses with a similar porch, though some houses have been remodeled to bring the space into the interior of the house. I’m willing to bet the porch was used for sleeping on hot summer nights in the days before A/C, as well as being a place for the family to gather in the evenings before the advent of radio and TV.
Screens keep the mosquitoes and biting flies as well as local annoying but non-biting lake & riverflies out.
Such porches are a pleasant place to sit on cool but sunny days in spring and fall. Passivew solar heating through the windows brings the temperature up to a comfortable level. In the summer, they make a nice bug-free place to sit if you replace the windows with screens.
in cold winter climates an enclosed porch is an airlock for the entry door, a buffer to prevent cold and air infiltration into the living room (which would have long hours of occupancy after dark). also it is very cheap weather tight storage that might also be used to store food in the winter.
it may have had removable storm/screen windows and doors. screens don’t last as long as windows. the screens might have deteriorated and never replaced.
Yep. Our house once had an open porch – the bases of the pillars are still there – but the previous owner enclosed it and used it for extra storage.
He not only enclosed it, he built a wall across the shorter portion (with a door) so now there’s sort of an enclosed entry (mud room, I guess) and a slightly larger room behind it.
Sometimes I think I’d like to make it an open porch again but (1) we don’t have the money and (2) there’s no view anyway.
The only time we use that room is when there’s a storm to watch.
Similarly, I imagine it provides an extra layer of insulation during the winter.
My sister’s house has exactly this, with an exit that leads to an outdoor deck in the back yard. The two spaces together are her summertime party space, as she has a grill out next to the deck.
And for the (indoor) cats she had a little shelf installed just beneath the windows around all three walls, so they can watch the wildlife and follow around the little critters who are scampering through the yard.
It’s a terrific space.