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Landscape Design Porches & Decks Design Dilemma

First house! Patio dilemma- help!

5 years ago

Hey designers!

My husband and I have big dreams of owning our first house with a nice sized yard. The house was built in the 60s and has this adorable covered patio but we’re looking for something much bigger and for entertaining! ideally we’d like to build off of the existing porch and over towards the left side of the yard (in the picture). We have a line of beautiful hemlocks we plan to keep as well.

i don’t even know where to start, anyone have some awesom design ideas?

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Comments (3)

PRO
Sina Sadeddin Architectural Design
5 years ago
Is this the front or back of the house?
Suzie Davidson thanked Sina Sadeddin Architectural Design
Judy Mishkin
5 years ago
last modified: 5 years ago
i would start by looking at a lot of photos at houzz for materials that appeal to you.

then with a large sheet of graph paper, with your covered porch and house drawn to scale at one side... and pieces of paper of outdoor furniture you have or want to buy. lay it out on the open paper... make a grill zone... conversation zone.... think about what you want to look at when you look out the window. think HARD about how much space you want between zones.

draw a shape that you like around your furnishings... and get estimates on how much it would cost to build THAT SHAPE.

hopefully you wont get knocked off your chair by the price. if its too much discuss how much to build the same space with a less expensive material... say poured concrete instead of pavers. or less space with the same material, there are two ways to go less expensive.

but i'd rather have a lower cost material be the size i want than something still pricey AND too small.

what rooms are in the back of your house? its a nice thing to someday open up a window to become patio doors... so maybe don't have the patio just to the side...
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We are planning to eventually build out a deck around the other side of the house, but that won't happen for a while (there is a fire escape in the way. It's an old house, and that's a whole other story...). The lot is only ~50-55' wide at that point (pretty densely packed mostly single-family houses), so I think having too large (especially too wide) of a deck would be weird. The half patio/half deck gives a compromise of more useable space without having the deck as the whole outdoor space and running the width of the yard. Rereading your comment, though, are you suggesting to replace the stoop entirely and build the patio up to the stoop stairs? The two-stage plan would give us house-level decking and ground-level patio.
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Your paint color will need to go well with the wood flooring and trim. Is there some piece of the trim that you could take to a paint store and get advice on complementary colors? It's going to cost you a bit to paint that large space, so you want to get the color right the first time. I'm not so sure a blue-gray will work well with that trim, but I leave that to the color experts. It's a dramatic looking room, but it has challenges for furniture placement. The sectional that is there now looks like it fits in well. Any chance you might want to buy it from the sellers? If it were my house, I would be thinking of removing the wood stove down the road. (Unless you simply love or need a wood stove.) That pipe going to the ceiling isn't particularly attractive, especially with the kink in it. You could replace it with a direct vent gas fireplace that vented out the back.
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Thanks for the feedback on this everyone. Just wanted to update in case anyone else has such a dilemma. I DID find the material I was looking for (grey with white veining) after searching inventory systems all over the country for weeks. The material is a marble, and called Blue de Savoie. I ordered a sample of from a slab and fell in love. Sadly, the slabs were only available in NYC and I was outside of their delivery range. I tried everything to get the slab or something similar sourced through local vendors and could not make it work. I ended up going with a Carrara marble instead which wasn’t exactly what I was looking for but did turn out very nicely. I think the fireplace complements the kitchen and other finishes we chose well. Please see attached for initial Savoie de blue marble I found, how our fireplace turned out and a photo of our kitchen which is located at the other end of the room that the fireplace is in. The house is still under construction hence some incomplete finishes. Thanks everyone for the feedback.
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Suzie Davidson
Original Author
5 years ago
That’s the back of the house...

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