Our “Always A Work In Progress” Outdoor Room

One of my favorite spaces in our house is the screen porch. Here is how the screened porch has changed over the years.

Thank you for visiting this older post on my site. In 2020, this space was reimagined and rebuilt as an all-weather Sunroom and is featured in a series for the One Room Challenge that same year. After enjoying this post, I hope you visit the series of posts for the One Room Challenge, starting with the Inspiration Post for Week 1 for our Mid-Century Inspired Sunroom.

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Our screened porch room is one of my favorite areas of our house, especially during the warmer months in the South. I can enjoy the outdoor space without dealing with the bugs that summer brings.

The pictures in this post show the best the screen porch probably ever looked before the wood rot and damage from the dogs got too bad.

I have posted about this room at least once for the last three or four summers, explaining how we have decorated it differently each time and how we use it each year.  

This room seems to change constantly, depending on how we decide to use it or how much the dogs want to destroy it.

2014 we finally started using this room after removing the ugly green plastic indoor/outdoor carpeting (whoever thought that was a good look?). We spent most of the summer of 2013 scraping the glue off the concrete floor. 

The furniture and accessories we had available to use for the room were sparse, so it lacked design, comfort, or personality.

It was functional but boring.

To add a bit of character to the rug for a blog project, I hand-painted circles on it that year. The painted outdoor area rug didn’t last but two summers because I quickly learned that even though it was an outdoor rug, it still started to smell of wet dogs and mold. Gross! I gladly threw that rug in the trash at the end of the season.

In 2015, I changed the furniture and rug in the room and tried to soften the look with new throw pillows and slip-covered cushions for the rockers.

This was also the year we installed lattice panels on the lower sections of the screens to prevent cats, dogs, and raccoons from tearing them out.  

We struggle to find a place to put the cat food bowl each day because raccoons, squirrels, birds, and occasionally a family of red foxes go after it. Putting the bowl inside this room just tempted the creatures even more, and they would rip out the screens to get to it. The lattice panels saved us from this problem, but we also accepted the fact that we were going to go through a lot of cat food either way.

This was a lovely space to enjoy the warmer summer months until we got the new puppies in September.  

The screen porch became the area we kept them in until they were fully house-trained, and so they constantly made a mess in this room. Not to mention, they sharpened their new teeth on the wood and wicker furniture.

In the summer of 2016, we realized we liked to use this room more as a summer dining room. Most days, I would eat all three meals out here.  I brought in a plastic table that used to be my crafting table and desk, and adding some painted orange folding chairs, when needed, gave us more seating for company.

And you will notice the long gates in this photo – one inside and one outside the windows.

This summer, we added several dog gates to our outdoor spaces to keep the dogs in and out of our more relaxed human spaces while we ate or had family over.

The gate gave them direct access to the outside pen, so there were no muddy paw prints on the rug and furniture every day.

Of course, we would remove the gates and let them enter the whole space, supervised, of course.

Let me tell you I love this green and white rug. I paid only $22 online at Lowe’s for it last summer, and it is a plastic woven version. It is not nearly as soft as the previous rug, but it is so much better to hose it down and clean it with soap and water—and it never smells like a wet dog!

I added the large galvanized bucket as a small table in the corner and covered it with a red bandanna for added color.  I purchased the large galvanized bucket at Tractor Supply this Spring to be used as an ice/drink cooler for my son’s wedding rehearsal party.  Of course, I don’t have another use for the bucket yet, so temporarily using it as a table makes sense and gives it a storage place.  

We also added a few strands of string lights to make this space usable at night. The light from the ceiling fan is a bit harsh, so these small string lights add just enough soft glow to the space.  

So this is how we have used our screened porch room over the years.  It worked well once the puppies grew up and didn’t destroy the furniture as much.  

But wood damage and rot were slowly taking over the framed walls of the screen porch.

Then, in 2020, we got a new puppy, Recon, a very active and large German Shepherd who quickly figured out that he could get out of the top screened sections of the walls.  He tore through every single one of them!

By the Fall of 2020, we had decided to finally tear down the two screened walls and build an all-weather sunroom!

2021—Our plans to enclose this space have finally come true, and it will be part of the Spring One Room Challenge.

I will update this post with links to the challenge posts over the next few weeks. Until then, be sure to check the blog’s main page for the latest posts.

“Carefully consider the path for your feet, and all your ways will be established.”     Proverbs 4:26

You can enjoy the posts for our Mid-Century Inspired Sunroom

by starting at the first post in the series about the room’s inspiration.