Will there be light?

Another design consideration is the degree to which your porch will receive light and the degree to which it will effect the light that comes into your home. The good news is that we have numerous design techniques to ensure that the room adjoining your new porch still receives light. Often we find that homeowners have so much light coming into that particular room that they have the blinds drawn a good portion of the time. A porch addition will help with that scenario. If direct sunlight preservation into the adjoining room is a challenge, we can utilize skylights and roof design techniques to preserve light coming into your home. The same is true in managing the sunlight that enters your porch. We can design the components such as direction, roof shape, and more to manage the light that come into your new room.

Gable roof screened porch

Will it be cause for more work?

In years past, adding a deck meant adding annual maintenance tasks for your home. That no longer needs to be the case. Your new porch can be built with numerous low maintenance materials to ensure there is no staining, sealing, scraping or other maintenance that’s required on an ongoing basis. It’s important to note that low maintenance is not the same as no maintenance. No surface is no maintenance. If dirt or stains land on the surfaces, you’ll need to clean those surfaces the way you do inside your home. In most cases, low-maintenance surfaces are easier to clean than traditional higher maintenance outdoor building materials such as pressure-treated lumber.

Overland Park screened porch with lattice skirting painted to match the house siding

What porch amenity options are available?

Great news! You won’t believe the number of amenity options that are available today. One of the most popular amenities that Kansas City homeowners are integrating into their porches is an outdoor porch fireplace. Homeowners are adding this not only to screened in porches but also to open-air porches.

Leawood KS screened porch with outdoor fireplace

Some other popular amenities including adding an outdoor TV to your porch. Have your porch builder mount your television above your outdoor fireplace or on an interior wall. Another question we are asked is whether you need to purchase an outdoor rated television. If you’ve looked around, outdoor rated televisions are tremendously expensive, prohibitively so. We work with you to select a protected area or interior wall to mount your television to protect it from any moisture that will blow through the screens. The cost of outdoor rated televisions is so expensive that you could purchase a couple different indoor TV’s if you had any discernable damage after having an indoor rated TV for a couple years.

On top of those amenities, we can add your sound system, the lighting you’d like, wire for electrical, add heating and more.

What are some other popular design ideas?

Porch roof styles

When we work with you to design your screened porch, we ensure that the roof shape, style and materials complement your existing home. Roof style is a very important considerations. We take into account the shape of your existing roofline or rooflines along with any restrictions such as second-story windows. As you see in the porch above, there are some great custom options available for roof shapes like this porch roof which is a shed style with an inset gable.

Olathe KS screened porch with inset gable roof and outdoor fireplace

The most important elements in designing your screened porch are the details about how you want to live on your porch. Unlike a house that comes with an existing number of rooms with room shapes you cannot change, your screened porch addition doesn’t have those restrictions so let us help you design it for how you want to live outside.

For a custom porch design consultation, give us a call at (913) 578-8990, email us or get some more great design ideas by looking at some photo galleries here on this website.