Open Up
for the same cost as a therapist you can open up your three season room instead of opening up to them.
Cramped, Rotting, Ugly, Not Functional. The way you feel inside may be the same way you feel about your three season room. Sure, you can do work on yourself and go pay a lot of money to see a therapist. Or you can pretend you’re doing work on yourself by actually doing work on your house. It’s much more immediately rewarding and you still get to spend a lot of money. Summer is coming, so I’m told, and I thought it would be a good time to talk about my three season remodel I did last Summer. While I can’t go into specifics about the construction process because I just didn’t document it, I can still go over the bigger picture things and maybe give you some ideas for when you decide to deflect from your own emotions.
What’s Wrong With that?
When I purchased my home I was initially excited about the three season room. I overlooked the rotting wood, small space, and carpeting that consisted of sample squares, because who doesn’t get excited about a three season room? But after a couple of years I started to realize why more than half of the three season rooms I see when I’m doing my window peeping rounds are just storage rooms for everyone’s junk. The room was small so it was cramped if more than two people were in at once. And I know I never have that issue but that’s beyond the point. Also, the room got so hot with all that glass in the summer that it was pretty much unusable. It didn’t help that glass walls were made of patio sliding doors that were sealed shut for whatever reason. Combine that with the fact that the room itself was aging worse than I am, and it was about time to do something. The patio doors were wood framed, which were rotting. Whenever it rained, water got into the room. Also the roof was leaking which caused the structure under it to rot. I guess sometimes you just reach a point where you have to start demolishing the things in your life.
I was initially planning on remaking the whole thing into a screened porch. I even planned to reuse the glass panels to make inserts for the cooler months. But after pricing everything out I decided I was going to cheap out like I do with most things in my life. So I went with a covered porch option. That way I can keep all of the framing and not have to deal with windows and framing. This would save me some money, but I still ended up spending more than I wished. With a project like this I don’t think that can be avoided.
Breakdowns Can Be fun
I Wish the Roof Was On Fire
So I went through and replaced a good portion of the roof and then installed a new rubber roof. Luckily I had my dad there to help so whenever I got to a ledge he could talk me off of it.
step 2: Spend all your life savings on wood
My plan was to use the existing structure and just wrap everything with new materials. For the exterior walls I used cedar siding, after installing house wrap. For the ceiling I installed mold resistant drywall to the ceiling joists. Although I didn’t plan on water contacting the drywall, it gets humid as hell in the summer so I wanted to play it safe. Over the drywall I installed 1/4” cedar tongue and groove planking. For the posts, facia (vertical outside surface underneath the overhang of the roof) and soffit (horizontal surface under the roof overhang), I used 1x6 cedartone treated lumber. Cedartone lumber is nice because it doesn’t have that ugly green look that regular pressure treated lumber has. Therefore I did not have to stain it. I stained all of my cedar lumber in my garage before installing it. This was a solid day of killing brain cells, but it was much easier to do it this way than stain everything after it is up on the walls and ceiling.
Southern Comfort
An important thing when it comes to outdoor electrical fixtures such as ceiling fans and lights is that they must be damp rated. Unless they’re going to come into direct contact with water, then they should be wet rated. No I do not expect water to ever come into the porch and then go upwards to hit the ceiling. But there’s always humidity and condensation. And there’s the fact that anything can happen. Just look at NFT’s. They make no sense, but they’re a thing.
Wrap It
From start to finish this took me about 2 weeks to do. It was a lot of work but it was way less work than trying to fix myself instead.