Our kit house came with about a dozen front-entry options. Most of them weren’t really porches at all — they were flush to the house, or very slightly recessed with some nice trim work. A couple had actual covered entryways, but those weren’t the style we chose. So we ended up with a flush entry on the side of the house. Nice trim. Not a porch.
For the back, I wanted a big porch. Wrap-around if I could swing it. I had this idea — based on no actual experience, because my parents didn’t have one and Jennifer and I had just come from city apartments — that I would love sitting outside in the rain when you want to be outside but don’t want to be outside. And on nice days. Basically all the time.
But the back of the house faced south, and Jennifer didn’t want to block the light. Fair point. Nobody wants to live in a cave unless you’re a night owl. So I asked Connor Homes — what about the angle of the sun in winter versus summer? You can calculate this stuff, right? You can size a porch so it lets winter sun in (lower angle) and blocks summer sun (high overhead). I figured surely the people designing houses think about this.
Nobody seemed to know what I was talking about. So we ended up with a porch that was, generously, about seven feet deep and less than half the width of the house. I’m not sure we even fit a table on it. I’d have to dig out the original plans.
The Wooden Door Lesson
While we’re on the subject of “things I didn’t know going in” — we got the traditional natural wood front door. Jennifer wanted authentic. The front door faces north, which is where most of our weather comes from. Nor’easters love that side of the house.
One storm, the rain is coming down sideways, and I walk to the front door and step in a puddle. Inside the house. The water is coming through the panels of the door — through the seams between the panels, specifically. We’d painted it when we got it. I called Connor and they said, well, you have to paint it. I said I did paint it. Turns out you paint it, let it fully dry, then caulk the seams, then paint it again. Would have been nice to know.
I would never buy a natural wood exterior door again. I get the appeal. I get authentic. But it adds work and it leaks, and you know what doesn’t add work? A door that doesn’t leak.
We also had no porch over the back door — the back door was at the corner of the house, completely exposed. Both doors just had small pressure-treated platforms with a couple of steps, sitting out in the weather.
The fix in the short term was storm doors on everything, within the first two years or so. Highly recommend. Storm doors are great with kids — kids leave doors open and at least something closes. Get the storm doors.
The Tarp Years
Out back we made a brick patio under the kitchen windows, where a porch should have been. Southern exposure. No trees. No shade. Henry’s birthday is in June and trying to do anything outside in the middle of the day was miserable.
So we tried things. Umbrellas — they pull over. Tarps — they blow away. Eventually a 12×12 pop-up tent, which was as big as I could manage to lift on my own and still not really enough. The tiny porch we did have wasn’t even big enough to sit in its own shade.
This went on for ten years. We built the house in 2010 and I finally got Jennifer on board with doing a real porch in 2020. Which turned out to be excellent timing.
Building It During Covid
We didn’t want to pay an architect to stamp plans, so Jennifer designed it and I found an engineer online who could stamp drawings. He was very nice. Everything came back, in my opinion, dramatically overbuilt — LVLs thicker than I thought we needed, that kind of thing. Jennifer wanted wide gaps between the support posts on the porch edge so there was a clear entry point to the backyard, which I kept getting told was structurally aggressive, even though there’s nothing on this porch except snow load.
I kept asking, is there another way? Is there a thinner version? And we kept getting back to the same beams. In hindsight, if I were doing this today I’d run the design through an AI to sanity-check before sending it to an engineer for the stamp. At the time AI wasn’t really a thing yet, so we just took what we got.
We also installed skylights over the kitchen’s triple window to make up for the light the new porch would block. Same problem here, by the way — I would love it if someone in residential construction thought about sun angles for skylight placement. Maybe they do and I keep finding the wrong people. Ours worked out fine, but more by luck than math.
There were permit issues with the town early in Covid — nobody really knew what was going on yet. Eventually they decided that an outdoor project, built by my friend essentially working alone, was fine. He got the permit and built it during lockdown.
The Build, Roughly
The new back porch ended up around 10 or 12 feet deep — I need to actually measure it — running the full width of the house. The front got a small cover, just over the entryway. I would have preferred a front cover big enough to span at least the first window on either side, for weather, but we kept it small.
Floor: Thermory — one of the steamed-wood brands. Letting it weather instead of fighting it. Our previous deck was mahogany and I was constantly oiling it with a tung oil and citrus solvent mix. Nightmare. Never again.
Columns: Connor Homes had gone out of business, so I couldn’t order matching columns. I looked at structural PVC columns, but those need to sit with the rafter centered on them, and our load wasn’t centered. Eventually I found a fiberglass sleeve — I think it’s an 8×8 outer that fits over a 6×6 pressure-treated core — and the dimensions matched our originals well enough that I reused the two original back porch columns on the front entry.
Shingles: Same GAF Slateline in antique gray we used on the rest of the house.
Trim: PVC, matched to our existing profile. More on this in a minute.
Siding: I’d saved all the leftover Hardie board from the original build. It had been sitting in the basement and then the barn for a decade waiting for exactly this. No matching, no sourcing, no problems.
The Slope I Should Have Caught
Here’s the one I want to flag clearly, because it’s on me. A porch floor needs to pitch away from the house. Weather hits it. Water needs to go somewhere that isn’t toward your siding and door threshold.
Ours is essentially level. There’s a negligible slope but not enough. I didn’t specify it on the plans. I didn’t measure during the build. By the time I thought about it the floor was already down. If I’m still around when the floor needs replacing, I’m going to figure out whether I can trim things down enough to build in a real pitch. The front cover is shallow so it matters less there. The back is where this would have mattered, and I missed it.
Same with a couple of the trim details I’d handle differently now — those are choices I didn’t make at the right moment, not things anybody did wrong on the build. I keep relearning the same lesson on every project: builders build what you specify. If you don’t specify, they default. The default isn’t always what you want, and if you don’t catch it during framing you live with it.
Hardware Cloth and the Rat Story
Jennifer didn’t want anything living under the porch. The standard method is hardware cloth: you bury it at a depth, angle it out, attach it to the porch framing, and sandwich it behind the trim board so there’s no visible gap. We did that.
The full rat story is its own post. It’s too involved to tuck in here.
The PVC Surprise
PVC trim is great for maintenance. You don’t worry about rot. Around the windows, I cannot say enough good things — switching from wood window trim to PVC was one of the best changes we ever made to this house, second only to the Hardie board siding.
But here’s what nobody told me, and what I didn’t think to ask about: PVC moves a lot with temperature. Long runs shrink in the cold and gaps open up. Big gaps. The kind of gaps that make you wonder if anything was glued at all. I don’t know if the right PVC adhesive holds against that kind of movement, or if the solution is shorter pieces with more joints, or both. Probably both. We’ll find out when I go back and recaulk this summer.
Two tips I picked up along the way:
- A cut edge of PVC looks raw and chalky. Wipe it with acetone and it reseals back to looking like the factory edge.
- Caulked PVC seams behave differently than caulked wood. If you don’t paint over the caulk, the caulk grabs dirt and becomes this sticky tracking strip. You either paint it or you accept a black line.
If I did it again I’d want to know in advance how to plan the runs and the joints around expansion and contraction. I assumed it would behave roughly like wood trim. It does not.
Paint, Bugs, and Haint Blue
There’s a Southern tradition of painting porch ceilings light blue — “haint blue” — supposedly to confuse insects into thinking it’s the sky so they won’t nest. I learned about this after we painted ours white. Of course. Thanks to whichever app on my phone was listening to me but not closely enough to be useful at the right moment.
The bugs aren’t terrible, but mud wasps love to build up under the skylights (which doesn’t make obvious visual sense to me, but they do), and barn swallows kept trying to nest on the trim ledges. I genuinely like barn swallows, but our porch use was inconsistent enough that we were stressing them out every time we came outside. So I built little wooden blocks to take away the ledges and pushed them to nest somewhere else. That was a non-trivial amount of trim modification for what amounts to bird relocation.
I’m going to try the blue ceiling this year. I’ve got to repaint the PVC trim anyway because of the caulk lines and shrinkage gaps, so I’ll do the ceiling at the same time. We’ll see if the wasps care.
The Fiberglass Column Mystery
I primed the fiberglass columns with an oil-based primer, exactly as recommended, cleaned everything, and the latex topcoat still bubbled in spots. I have no idea why. I spent real time trying to get a nice finish and ended up with a finish that’s fine if you don’t look at it too closely. If anyone reading this has solved this, I’d love to know.
What Worked
The size. A real porch you can actually use. The timing — finished just as we needed an outdoor space for a Covid pod. We had a college student come give the kids music lessons out there. We had families over without anyone going inside. It was exactly what we needed exactly when we needed it. Reusing the saved Hardie board and the original columns. Matched perfectly without sourcing anything. The skylights replacing the light we lost.
What Didn’t
The slope. My fault. Will haunt the floor’s lifespan. PVC movement — manageable but ongoing. Pella windows are still the regret they were in earlier posts. Not new information.
Grade
A-minus. Looks like it belongs on the house. Solved the actual problem after a decade of tarps and umbrellas. Loses the plus for the slope I should have caught, the column paint I can’t figure out, and a few trim details I’d specify differently if I were doing it again.
The rat story is coming as a separate post. That one needs room to breathe.
Even that's Odd 
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