If you’re looking for screened in porch ideas, you’ve come to the right place. Archadeck of Kansas City has been building screened porches, open porches, back porches and front porches for Kansas City homeowners since 2001.
We’ve built porches at every elevation, in every size, in many different shapes and with so many different amenities. You’re probably wondering what all the options are, which ones are important and how do you choose. We’re here to help.
Screened in porch in Prairie Village KS
Practically speaking…
Many of our customers tell us they have been thinking about adding a porch for years. We strongly encourage you to consider making this the year you finally add the porch you’ve dreamed of. We cannot tell you how many of our clients call us back to tell us that their porch is their favorite room in their house. They tell us they can’t imagine how they lived all those years without one.
Custom screened porch design in Leawood KS
There are numerous practical benefits including adding overflow room for gatherings, creating a space for you and your family to enjoy more fresh air and adding physical living space to your home. But what you’ll love most about your porch is the memories you are able to make there. When your best friend comes over, you want to sit and catch up in your favorite room in the house. When guests come over, you’ll want to celebrate the season by enjoying a meal outside. When the grandkids come to visit, what better way to let them play outside and be able to watch them too? Are your kids coming home from college with a handful of friends? Grab the sleeping bags and clear some space on the porch.
If you’re looking for ideas, we’ve put together a list of porch components and there are many ideas to explore within each.
Overland Park open porch with shed roof and inset gable
Matching your porch to your house
One of the first and most important questions our customers ask is whether we can make their new porch look original to their home. We absolutely will. There are a number of ways to make your porch look like it was built when your house was built. These include matching or complementing the roof, matching the facade, matching the gutters, matching the elevation and also matching or complementing features including the flooring.
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.
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) 704-6240, email us or get some more great design ideas by looking at some photo galleries here on this website.
