Tag Archives: patio covers

landscape design, my garden

our front porch project

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We began this project to redo our front porch surround last year. It’s not totally finished, but it’s at a point I thought I’d share it with you.

The house originally came with an enclosure around the little front porch/patio area that made it feel like you were behind bars, doing time for a crime you didn’t commit. We took a saw to the original porch cover and provided some breathing space in it, but it always felt like an uncomfortable retrofit. As the termites dealt a terminal blow to the first enclosure, I developed this completely reworked design, sort of a deconstructed patio cover, with openings through the front screening panel, as well as an open, incomplete canopy overhead.

porch-cover-front

This shows the shelter from the front of the house. The big window cut into the screen lets you see out into the neighborhood, while not making you feel caged.

porch-cover-front-angled

Another front view, approaching from the side of the house…

porch-cover-from-above

And a last shot from the roof, showing the partial covering overhead. Many of days are overcast, and we really would prefer sun over shade most days. This reduced cover shelters the big main window and front door, but lets more light in than an edge-to-edge cover.

The new wood needs to season just a little bit before the final finishing, and the old wood will need to be scrubbed to clean it a bit. But once the finish is on, it should really look great. I’m pleased!

Main materials: pressure-treated lumber for the support structure (painted black, to fade into the background); ipe hardwood lumber for the slats; exposed stainless steel screws for fastening the slats. The ipe hardwood is potentially the least green component of this project. Although my local lumber supplier is assuring its users that their ipe “is harvested from professionally managed sustainable forests,” some of my research is now saying that the claim just may be a crock of greenwashing. Ugh.

Choosing sustainable materials for an outdoor project is challenging. There are interesting discussions you can wade into, including an introductory Sustainable Decking Solutions post that’s worth a look. If you must use ipe, a supplier like AltruWoods can supply FSC certified lumber for a project, and might have been the better choice for getting materials for this project.

Whatever you do, reducing the amount of materials you use is a beginning. The post above recommends that “[o]ne green building idea with a lot of merit is treating wood as a luxury. Trees help the planet the most when they’re alive and globally, the acreage per forest is dwindling rapidly. Using wood as a common structural and outdoor finish material is not a long-term sustainable practice.” Good advice.

How do you all approach trying to be greener in your outdoor projects? I suppose one excellent alternative to a patio cover would have been to plant a tree. It’s a concept our grandparents would have signed on to…

landscape design, rambles

a cool idea for garden shade

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Maybe a year ago I was reading about a parking lot in town, at the local Kyocera corporate headquarters, where they’d installed what they were calling “Solar Trees.” (They actually trademarked the name, but really aren’t all trees solar?) The Kyocera species of trees were steel poles that supported big canopies made up of solar panels. They provided shade to the cars below, and at the same time they generated power. By the corporation’s estimate, one 30 by 40 foot solar tree would reduce as much greenhouse gases as a small grove of real trees.

Solar trees in parking lot

Installations like this are starting to appear in various places, including a couple of parking structures at UCSD where they’re installing rooftop arrays over this summer.

I’ve thought about doing more with active solar devices, but where to put the panels was always an issue since the house has some pretty wacked roof angles, most of which don’t face south. Some sort of solar structure in the garden might be an interesting solution, maybe something combining a patio cover function with power generation.

The Kyocera trees seem to be slanted more to corporate environments, and besides I find them more than a little monolithic and overwhelming. Would you want these in your garden? But something along these lines could be practical, good for the environment and attractive. Sounds like a job for an artist or designer instead of an engineer…

That these trees sprouted here in town left me wondering if there was any sort of link between them and Jim Bell, a local self-proclaimed “environmental designer” who, among other things, has run for mayor (unsuccessfully) twice, and once for City Council (also unsuccessfully). I met him at a book signing circa 2003, and he was hot on the idea of covering all the roofs and parking lots with solar panels. His web site has an interesting statistic:

In the San Diego/Tijuana region, where I live, 20 percent coverage of our buildings and parking lots with solar photovoltaic (PV) cells, coupled with efficiency improvements, would generate enough electricity to replace all forms of energy (electricity, natural gas, gasoline, and diesel) currently used in the region.

That idea was probably not his originally, either. But it speaks to a movement that’s in the air. Maybe the movement could begin right at home, in our back yards…