newly screened: a room with a view

Last year’s work party, us with my mom and two sisters, included re-screening the side porch. The middle child rebuilt the screen door and clad the previous owner’s particle board half walls with beadboard. Mom re-screened the window openings, all of us caulked and handled paint brushes, and I re-trimmed the openings. Through last summer and over the winter, it was mostly used for storage and keeping feral cats from the freezing cold.

Today, I brushed it off and made it usable for this season, even if it still has work to be done.

The schefflera is inherited from my husband’s first husband. It is the only house plant of size we have. It consumes our kitchen table in the winter, and lives on the screen porch in warm months. It has thrived and been reduced to three leaves, and every stage between. We now have an improved understanding of what it needs to flourish and hope to see it do so. The pot is new (35% off patio accessories!), I replanted it this morning.

The container was an instant ‘yes!’ when I found it. This is the feel I wanted on the screen porch all along: fun and colorful. This is a planter for the porch of a periwinkle house! For improved entertaining, plans include widening the window ledges to foot-wide counters covered with hand-painted tiles of a feel similar to the shefflera’s pot.

The witch ball was a yard sale find six years or so ago, sitting in a box in storage ever since, and sets quite nicely on an existing hook (we think for the porch swing original to the house).

A built-in bench/cat house, a wall hanging for the inside wall of the screen porch, and a wall-mounted fan are still on the list, as is a floor covering, and repainting the pair of great vintage metal chairs (disassembled and tucked into the corner in the top photo).

The south side of the porch is nearly all screen, nine foot wide by five foot-ish. It overlooks our driveway, and the lower lot recently added to our property. This view heavily influenced the push to pick up the lot at auction last fall… As the lower lot develops further, so will the view of our wabi-sabi life.