When your outdoor living area faces west, standard efforts to create shade will probably not be sufficient. Extreme measures may be required. At Archadeck of Austin, we will go to any lengths necessary to create the shade your family needs on your patio or deck. Does the back of your home face west, too? If so, then you need a builder who knows how to shade your west-facing patio effectively.
Patio Builder Archadeck of Austin Can Enlarge Your Patio, Too!
At this Pflugerville home, our clients wanted a larger patio, and they needed plenty of shade to go with it. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to enjoy their new patio from mid-day until sunset every day, and where’s the fun in that?
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— Before
In terms of patio size, you can see that they barely had enough room to turn around on the original patio. They made good use of the space they had with a table and chairs and a hot tub, too. We extended the concrete patio to make their outdoor living space larger and more functional. Then we covered the existing concrete and the new extension with a beautiful flagstone surface to unify the old and new sections. We love how the colors in the flagstone pick up the same tones in the brick on the home’s exterior.
Even though the original patio was covered by a porch roof, the area was blasted by the sun every afternoon. In our Before photo, you can see that the sun even bleached the stain out of the wood on the roof gable. The direction and angle of the sun rendered that roof ineffective as a shade structure, so afternoon shade simply could not exist here. To remedy that situation, we designed and built a new beam system over the extended patio and added a custom free-standing pergola. The cedar pergola is big and beefy and complements the new patio in both scale and color.
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The top row of wood across the pergola is designed to meet the sun head-on. These purlins or slats are positioned close together for increased shade, but we didn’t stop there. We also added a TopGal polycarbonate cover to the pergola for increased protection from the sun. The homeowners chose a bronze-tinted TopGal cover because it filters out more sun than clear polycarbonate sheets would filter. TopGal blocks UV rays while allowing light to penetrate, and it will also reduce the heat on this patio in the afternoons.
Another Ingenious Solution from Porch Builder Archadeck of Austin
We didn’t stop with a sun-filtering TopGal pergola cover, either! When we custom-built the new gable porch roof, we added something the original gable didn’t have: a solar screen. That’s right, we hand-stretched solar screening across the gable opening to block the intense late-afternoon heat. These screens block 90% of the sun’s heat that would normally enter through the gable opening. We outflanked the clients’ concerns from every angle!
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We also added a ceiling fan to the covered patio for cooling breezes. The ceiling is so tall we installed a 7-8 ft. drop rod to bring the fan down to the best level for effective cooling. Our electrician also installed the necessary electrical capacity to facilitate the homeowners’ hot tub on the patio. Our Pflugerville clients are loving their new covered patio with shade, shade, and more shade.
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Do you need shade, a covered patio, or a bigger covered patio than the one you currently have? Now is the time to get started! Call Archadeck of Austin today at (512) 886-8367 or email us to schedule your free design consultation.
Jim Schallon, Lead Designer at Archadeck of Austin.
