How absolutely stunning! Iove a beautiful porch, who doesnt? The years of gathering after dinner out on the porch to escape the heat of the house.

It sounds like this home had been in the family forever . Was your family the original owners ?

Agree with Kristine, your porch is so overwhelmingly beautiful and historical, I’m afraid everyone else will be afraid to post their mundane everyday porches!

How long has the home been in your family?

Your porch is a dream. I have a very small 1960s porch. It's more like a covered stoop. Not beautiful and useful like yours.

When we repainted our house from red to white last year, we tore off a small screened porch from the corner of our house and wrapped the house with a porch. The red wall with the shelves is the white wall with the outlet in the last photo. (The hanging chair got rehung and we sadly have lost both our lovely tan doxie and our kitty.) We use our new porch constantly.

For some reason I have to comment to see more than my original post. Grrr

Barncatz, your porch is lovely!

I love the white and the openess of your porch with that great view, wow !

trying to make it let me in again

Lovely. Mine is just messy and probably will be for a while. I took down the rotting trellis on either end.

@jacqueline9CA, oh my gosh, your house is so beautiful. And to have all that history! I think that relaxed 1914 photo you posted is one of the few I've ever seen from that era that brings home they were people just like us.

We're in W. WI. Those bluffs are on the WI side of the Mississippi.

Does your porch wrap around the house side?

grrrr

Sorry for the "grrr", but Houzz won't let me see any new posts unless I post a comment, sigh. barncatz - it wraps around, but only about 10 ft.

Jackie

Thunderstorms all day today so it seems a little dark but this is my happy place.

grrr

Sue - I can just feel the humidity and threatening weather in your picture - wish we had some of that here now! Lovely porch, and lovely privacy and forest in the background - can you post a pic of what it looks like from outside your house?

Jackie

Hi Jacqueline. First, let me say how beautiful your porch is and I hope you enjoy your time there. Heavy hail and lightning at the moment but here's a winter pic of the front of the house. Also, the view from the porch.

decor · More Info

decor · More Info

Sue - Lovely (I presume) sunset? What are those mountains in the background?

The view from our porch is just our garden and then a busy street, but in the past 3 days when it has been 105+ (but dry, thank goodness) every day, my DH has discovered that there is a breeze if he sits out on the porch, and it is cooler, so he has been out there most of every day, reading.

Jackie

Yes, sunset on the San Francisco Peaks in Northern Arizona.  Summers here are mild but looking forward to cooler days ahead. Love everyone's porches here, can't wait to see more.

These are all such wonderful pictures! Love these porches! Like how they're not too cluttered and have so much space.

I don't really have a porch, just front steps, but I do have an old house. It has a raised back deck which is kind of like a tree house because it's next to a black walnut, and the deck looks in to the tree and the sunsets. I fell in love with old houses when I was a kid and would visit my grandma in Arkansas. Here is her porch. We would sit outside on the porch at night . My uncle Dan would often be smoking a cigar, and we might have a lemonade while katydids were making a racket in the trees. My grandma had a porch swing and one of those glider sofas.

I was in love with her house. It had a sleeping porch, a floored attic you could go in, nooks and crannies, a telephone landing with a heavy old black telephone, dinner chimes, a butler's pantry, a place to burn trash outside. A clawfoot tub. Little gas space heaters. A back porch we sometimes had dinner on.

This house was across the street, and when I was a kid was a nursing home. Lots of old people would sit in rocking chairs on the porch. Now it is a bed and breakfast place called the Duchess of Little Rock or Belle of Little Rock. I wanted this house badly when I was a kid but my parents had no interest in old houses and would not have wanted to live in Little Rock. It was for sale at one point...I think it was $40,00 or so. I have been up in the tower and have seen the elevator mechanism in the attic.

My front steps

All the porches are beautiful! Old houses have always fascinated me as well. My husband is a carpenter and finds remodeling a pain, but I would love to get one of those old houses that are in disrepair and restore it. They have so much more charm than most modern houses and the history they contain is priceless. My family moved a lot while I was growing up and I never had the chance to put roots down anywhere. As I get older and my own children are heading out to create lives of their own, I find myself drawn to a more settled life with a real “home place” and a wide porch where we we can gather and just “be” at the end of the day. Eventually we hope to have such a porch. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy looking at your porches! Thanks for the great thread, Jackie.

Erasmus - your front steps are so lovely and lush. I love the way you have used colors. Looks as if people are forced to pay attention to the flowers, to avoid stepping on them!

Thank you for posting the pics of those 2 old lovely houses. So happy to hear that the old very fancy one is now a B&B, so anyone can go and enjoy it if they want. Sleeping porches - if you look at the two pics of our house above, there is a sleeping porch in the middle of the top floor. In the old picture, it is not yet screened in - just open. It has been screened in for at least 60-70 years, but my FIL told me that when he was a teenager, before it was screened in, there was an old wisteria growing up that side of the house, and he used to climb up the wisteria and get into the sleeping porch when he had been out late (or snuck out) without permission. They always kept beds in the sleeping porch, in case it got very hot - that was the point of them.

judijunebugarizonazn8 - yes, front porches with enough room to gather add an immense value to houses. Ours is one story up, so we get to look out over the garden.

Jackie

Thank you, Jackie. I like the colors you use too and the plants. I like the dark green trim with the sage green walls, and the beautiful windows. Your FIL was one year older than my dad.

The old houses do have history. My grandma's sleeping porch had two twin beds on it and we'd use them, my cousin and I. She had no air conditioning and Little Rock, AR gets very hot in summer. Three sides were screened in so you could catch a breeze.

My house used to have a wrap around porch and it would be nice to rebuild it. We have a door to nowhere that used to open out onto the porch. A porch is a great place to relax together. Makes memories.

Thank you, erasmus - when we were getting ready to have the house painted a few years ago (and change the color), we drove up to a town North of us which has large neighborhoods of Victorian houses which have been either well maintained or restored. We drove around for about an hour, just looking for a soft color of green to paint the bulk of the house. Then we went to the paint store, and got 5 mini cans of possibilities, and my DH painted LARGE (like 3 ft by 4 ft) areas on the back wall of the house. We HATED 4 of them, but luckily loved the fifth one. After that selecting the trim, etc. was easy.

I do hope you decide to re-build your porch -

Jackie