The Boxed-In Front porch-Why?

In My Humble Opinion
21

My grandmother has an enclosed front porch, on her house in a small Midwest town.

It contains a coat closet, a place to leave wet/muddy shoes, and a cafe table with 2 chairs. In spring through fall, it’s a great place to eat your breakfast while reading the news paper and watching people. Depending on the temperature, the windows may be open (to screens) or closed. In the winter, it serves as a buffer between the winds blowing across the prairies and the living room. It’s a very informal area (Grandma was born about 1910 and things were a bit more formal), and it seems that she feels more comfortable sitting and chatting while in say grubby gardening cloths, than she would be sitting in the living room.

22

I have a small enclosed back porch I just built last year. It has the dog door allowing the dogs outside without letting all the warm air out in the winter. It’s a space to store dogfood, wood pellets and ladders. My covered front porch is open, 24’ X 6’, with a porch swing, a rocker and a trellis, and it’s a great place to sit on a rainy day and read.

StG

23

My ideal house would have two porches – an enclosed, windowed one facing south for cold weather use, and an open, screened one facing north for hot weather use.

Plants and wicker furniture for both! And garden views … :slight_smile:

24

I have always viewed front porches as a social element of a neighborhood. It is the interface through which the inhabitants of a house communicate with their neighbors. Covering it up is like gagging a house. If I were king, all houses would have front porches and when the king walked by you would have to come out and chat with him, except when he was in a bad mood you would just wave to him.

25

It is a sad sad state of the times to see all the porches enclosed on older homes. The reasons given existed at the time they were built as well- heat loss, weather issues, etc. But the porch was still left open. It had a curb appeal quality as well as a social gathering space.
I bought a cute little reverse cape in Maine that has the open covered porch. It keeps the rain off the front door and allows me to unlock the door when arriving home in a rain or snow storm without becoming drenched. I do enjoy all the season with it. In the fall a heavy sweater is enough. In the winter I decorate it for the holidays. In the spring the sun hits it at such an angle in the early morning that bundled up I can enjoy my coffee while basking in the sun. In May the Lilacs bloom and the perfume of the flowers is potent only when sitting on the porch.
If you just assume it is too cold and too wet or too…you are short changing yourself. There is much to be missed by not experiencing all that your porch can be.

26

This.

[ol]
[li]No porch or small porch -> large covered porch;[/li][li]Large covered porch -> screened porch for summer use;[/li][li]Screened porch -> glassed/semi-sealed porch for year-round use, including weather isolation and mudroom.[/li][/ol]
We have a porchless colonial that was always supposed to grow a full wraparound porch. Didn’t. Next owner can do it. Of course, it will need to be heated and airconditioned to make it at all useful.

27

I fully agree. Thank you.

28

I know this is a zombie but this sold me on the idea of a sunroom. :slight_smile:

29

The back deck has replaced the front porch in functionality in modern homes. An enclosed porch needs less maintenance since it’s not exposed to the weather, the energy efficiency and providing an airlock have been covered, and in many homes front porches were ‘boxed in’ and heated to provide additional living space, sometimes with a front porch added in front of the old one. It’s a lovely feature on a house here in New England for the 3-4 months out of the year with tolerable weather to use an unenclosed front porch but I guess that’s not enough to keep them that way.

30

Huh. We have a nice rear deck that’s largely screened from the sun, and I think we’ve eaten out there three times in six years. I won’t say there haven’t been pleasant evenings, but on every evening we are prepared to set up and eat outside, it’s cold, windy, raining (or worse)… or too humid and muggy to set foot outside.

I guess if you’re prepared to make sitting outside an activity driven by the availability of good weather for it, it’s okay, but I’ve always found it hard to change family plans (and inertia) on short notice.

31

It may not have been to code, but in college, I slept in an enclosed front porch. It had been turned into an additional bedroom. I joked that I was sleeping in a bowling alley, because it was as long as the front of the house, and just wide enough to fit a bed crosswise. An electric wall heater had been added to the room.

I know of a couple of houses today that look like the same thing has been done.

32

The people who bought my godmother’s house did exactly this. The house originally had 2BR and they had 3 kids. Only difference was that they had theirs insulated and added a heat register.

The next owner knocked out the wall separating it from the living room, thereby extending the living room. They added a bay window.

Speaking of which, front doors around my (New England) way are seldom used (except for mail delivery) because of the potential heat loss: You go in and out of the side door, which usually has stairs going up to the kitchen and down to the basement. The area right inside the door is the mud room.

One of my exes grew up in a big old rambling Victorian “clunker” which still has its original screened in side porch. When he and his siblings were kids they slept out there during the summer.

33

I have just such a porch on my house!

It’s not original to this 135yr old cottage, as the transom window was discovered fully intact beneath the dry wall. Almost all the houses on my street have porches, some larger and grander. But ours is the only enclosed one.

We love it and get tons of use out of it. During really spectacular weather, summer or winter, it’s amazing to sit and watch it. The neighbours come out and watch for a moment only to retreat indoors quickly. I take my tea and cuddle up with my dog and watch the snow pile up or the rain pour down. It’s awesome.

We don’t use it as a mud room, to BBQ, or for coats, instead I’ve converted into a sort of library with a long shelf running the entire length of the porch, above door and windows. It holds a lot of books, plus there is additional book shelving below the windows as well. (Pretty sure all the books add insulation during the cold, cold winter!) A deacon style bench where you come in and a high window seat, to lay on, at the other end. It also holds my rock collections, deer antler and various artifacts of our travels.

Brought a lovely hammock back from Cambodia, kept under the seat of the bench, and with the mounts in place so it’s a breeze to hook up and take down. I spend time in it most every afternoon!

We get a lot of use from the porch, even in winter as we have a heated throw. In the autumn I can extend the flowering of my summer pots by several weeks by bringing them into my porch, which is wonderful. In the fading winter, the sunshine creates enough solar gain to make it warm enough for hammocking by late afternoon. A lifesaver when you’re bone tired of winters chill! Warm enough to add heat to the house even though there is still snow on the ground.

It was unused space, no shelves or seats, of little utility when we bought the house. But now it sees lots of use and is one of our favourite spaces. Every day when my hubby gets home, after dropping his gear, he heads to the window seat with our dog. Just to relax and chill, watch the world go by, enjoy the view and shake off that work feeling. I get in the hammock and we chatter while watching the the neighbour kids play. Pretty sure that’s how porches have always been used, and ours still is, almost daily, - even though it’s enclosed!

34

Similarly, closed-off balconies were very popular here in Israel, although closing them off is now illegal. I’m sitting in one now. It’s a narrow, Bauhaus-style balcony in a 1930’s building, about 4 by 15 feet long, with a waist-high wall around the edge, closed off with large glass windows. It’s a bit of a hothouse during the summer - although the cypress trees outside help a lot - but other than that, it’s a great work space.

35

My grandparents house in a small midwestern town had a window enclosed front porch. Except for the coldest weather, that was where the kid table was at family events. It was a tight space though, perfect usage for 4-10 yos. I also slept in it a few times. Their house had been converted to two family and that was the access to the second story, so we had to go through the porch to get to the storage space or bedrooms upstairs. Since their passing, the current owners re-opened the inner access to the second story, tore off the enclosed porch and put on a small deck in place of it.
Interesting that many of my dreams take place in that house even though we visited maybe 3-4 times per year.

36

My grandparents enclosed off the porch to make a library, so that my great uncle could have a bedroom where the old library was. It also was where all the toys were stored.

This was also how my great aunt on the other side of the family did things, except it was just a toy room. As a kid, I always marveled at how it could be as messy as you wanted, but you’d always have a clean bedroom. It just seemed a perfect idea to avoid having to clean your room.

The front porch was never completely walled off, though. Though grandma’s had two open walls with a railing, because you would not want to fall basically an entire story to the ground otherwise. They even kept a cellar under that porch.

37

When I lived in St. Louis, a place with four very distinct seasons, I had a screened porch area off the kitchen. Which we equipped with an outdoor dining table and chairs. We ate out there as often as we could. Which was most meals in spring and fall, early breakfasts or late dinners in the dog days of summer, and almost never in winter.

It’s mostly a matter of establishing the mental habit that outdoors is the default and you only retreat inside if it won’t be pleasant. Our neighbors with the more typical Midwestern habits substantially never used their screen porches even on beautiful 75 degree days filled with blooming trees and singing birds. Because their mental default was eating inside.

Give it a try; you might like it.

38

We ate outside at least twice a week for around half the year in California. Here, surrounded by woods, we expected to make the most of the non-precipitative months, and brought a huge market umbrella with us to cope with light weather.

As I said, the evenings that are pleasant enough to sit outside are so rare we simply lost the habit. Not just cold, but cold and windy. Not just rain, but wind-blown downpours. Then not warm, but hot and 100% humidity, without a break at night time. The occasional evening that was calm and warm managed to fall on nights we couldn’t relocate outside, and the outside table and chairs weren’t kept clean enough for dining, so a long cleanup step had to be factored in. Easier to just open the big slider, with the screen closed (did I mention the bugs here in the woods?) and pretend.

A covered porch might have helped, but we never built one. I am pleased to be moving somewhere with much better weather, because outdoor coffee in the morning and dinner in the evening are two free and priceless things.

39

Long ago my Dad came home from the hardware/lumber store with an odd assortment of windows and plans to enclose his front porch as described in the OP. To me it seemed really dumb but I still went along and helped him do it all. That winter I stayed over there a couple times to go hunting and -------- even without heat it was warm enough out there to sit in comfort until me buddy arrived to pick me up. And we’re talking PA in January 4am. It was situated just right to get the best sun and it usually stayed about 30 degrees or more warmed than “outside”. In the summer it was screens and it really caught a nice breeze making it cooler than the living room inside the door of the house. Dad just called it the Sun Room and it became almost like a den for him. It gave me a new appreciation for the idea and the Old Man.

40

ETA: @AB.

Yeah. Makes sense. My pre-STL heritage was always places with much better than average weather. As you had in CA. So it was easy to bring the “eat outside” habit with us and force it to persevere into the less than ideal weather of St. Louis shoulder seasons. We still got good regular use about 7 months per year albeit not every meal every day. Plus partial use for another month or so. We ate many an outside meal during a warm mild rain or drizzle. Thunderstorms chased us inside more than once.

If your part of New England is blistering summer, frozen winter, or sodden in-between then the “good” days are so few and far between as to not be worth it. Trying to make do with an unscreened umbrella vs a covered screened room trebles the chances for failure.

Agree completely about the value of living where the weather is usually nice not nasty. Growing up in coastal SoCal one of my sayings was “Anyplace you can’t survive outdoors naked for 24 hours is no place a human should live.” I still think so.

Here in FL we use our covered screened porch for most meals. Lunch in August is a bit too hot and sticky. Pre-dawn in Feb is a bit chilly for leisurely coffee on some days. Otherwise it’s pretty darn awesome.

Where are you thinking of moving? I recall seeing you mention the idea in other threads but I’m not recalling where or when.