Building a Prairie-styled porch screen / trellis

Mention you have a home in Oak Park, and inevitably you are asked if it is near or similar to the many Frank Lloyd Wright homes in the area. The fact is, he had nothing to do with our home, or most of those in our neighborhood. Nevertheless, Humphrey House took one step closer to emulating the famous prairie-style architect this weekend.

Ever since our kitchen remodel, we noticed that one of our windows that brings in tons of daylight also allows unwanted views from our alley. While we do have blinds, I wanted to create a visual screen using one of the existing support posts on our rear porch, and thought a trellis to grow vines up during summer would be a fantastic solution. A homegrown green screen, of sorts.

After purchasing and temporarily hanging some typical diagonal criss-cross lattice, Jen and I both were underwhelmed. It seemed to clash too much with the rest of the porch and there was no clear place to transition it. Enter our friends from Tiny Bungalow, who stopped by to visit one Saturday, and mentioned that a screen could be made out out of spare wood, emphasizing horizontal and vertical lines, which would better compliment the home. Duh! This should have been plainly obvious, but just one of those mental block things we had.

Fortunately, under the porch, I still had a stash of old wood lathe and even some old growth pine 2x4s from the kitchen wall we wrecked on the Today Show, and I realized that creating a screen trellis would be the perfect homage! The space was 4' x 4', and could even be framed with studs 16-inches on center, just like the wall we had torn down.

Onto the design. I knew horizontal lines would be important, and Jen (a designer) always emphasizes the "rule of three". So I figured 3 groups of 3 pieces of lathe would be the foundation of the design. Once this was in place, the top and bottom were too open, so I played with a few layouts and settled on a 1-2-1 piecing. After painting and hanging all the wood, it looked great, but still a bit too sparse.

It was time to figure out some vertical arrangements. I originally planned to bisect the groups of three with short vertical pieces. But this ended up looking too.. eh, formulaic? I played with other designs, doing them in X shape, a diamond shape, but it just didn't look right. I went inside to see the view from the kitchen area, and examined how the rear door's stained glass was done. Then I realized that by partially spanning the groups of three on the trellis to connect one group with the other, I could create a much more organic-looking design. I also remembered that Frank Lloyd Wright's stained glass work often mirrored the prairie grasses and plants, so I tried to figure out how to achieve that. After all, we planned to grow plants up it half the year anyway. I started with a tight group of vertical pieces, representing "leaves" of a plant, which then open to the wider "flowers" of a plant, shown in the image below.

Ultimately, things came together quite stunningly. This is now a very striking addition to our backyard, and I daresay even a focal point of the home when viewed from the rear. Complimented by some nifty little lanterns and soft colorful lighting put up by Jen, our rear porch finally has a welcoming feel to it that draws the eye and body outside. A truly remarkable transformation. Thanks for the inspiration, TinyBungalow! And to Jen, Scott, and Julie, who all were on hand to help me shape and give feedback during the process! And thanks Mr. Wright for your timeless influence!


I added one final artisanal touch that may be hard to notice from the photos here. The very top piece in the middle section has a complete circle from a knot in the wood, perfectly centered in the lathe, and the very bottom piece of lathe has a half-circle in it. From sun to moon, we now have a beautiful arts and crafts influenced screen trellis built into our porch.

Now, I just need to resist the temptation to create other designs with all the other pieces of lathe we have stored under the porch...

Finally Fixing the Back Porch

Last weekend we started doing some outdoor upkeep around the yard, including the first mow of the season. Each year, I think we get more and more determined to have less and less grass. This year, we're starting a vegetable garden in the already-small backyard. And I love the idea of a "no-mow" lawn mix of groundcover wildflowers and clover for the front yard. Maybe next year?

In any case, this weekend we picked up a new "Earth Machine" composter and yet another rain barrel. Jen wonders if we have enough rain barrels, and I say, No way, there's always room for more! More on the rain barrels in another post.

It was such a nice day that our friends from Tiny Oak Park Bungalow even dropped by while I was working the yard and delivered a much welcome gift of native plants - some purple coneflowers for our front yard! We were pleasantly surprised and very grateful. They'll make a nice replacement for the dead mums that have lived in front of our house for the last six months.

Also, we've been struggling with a way to have a functional and aesthetically pleasing screen visual for the window off our back porch that overlooks the alley (a lovely view in winter). I had some lattice work temporarily attached for about a month, which worked great as screening, but seemed a little too "off" in terms of the design. I just couldn't figure out how to transition that lattice with the stairs leading up the back porch of our arts and crafts home. Here is the power of a fresh set of eyes. A friend commented that a design with more horizontal and vertical lines would complement the home a lot better and look less tacky. Duh! I felt like a ton of craftsman bricks hit me in the forehead.

So with that in mind I sketched an idea for the nearly 4-foot by 4-foot area we would like to screen. In an homage to the old kitchen wall we dismantled, we may even be able to construct this with some of the wood (yes I still have it). The design consists of adding two 2x4 vertical studs (guess what... on 16-inch centers). Then, approximately every foot, have a group of three narrow pieces of wood running horizontally. Throw in a few short vertical pieces to "tie" the groups of three together, and voila! A craftsman-zen type of porch screening that will also allow us to (hopefully) grow a climber like clematis up during the summer months. Here is a pretty lame, but effective mockup I did in Photoshop of how this might look.


Next step: doing the work, as well as finishing the painting job that got cut short last fall. And yes, we'll be fixing the lattice inconsistency under the porch as well, so things aren't quite as ghetto here at Humphrey House.

Reusing an Old Concrete Sidewalk

I recently re-acquainted myself with a local architect who happened to come through our home during the green home tour last fall. He's doing a renovation of a green detached garage, and told me about a neat idea he's doing that could have a place in our backyard plans.

Instead of completely demolishing an existing sidewalk to better fit our backyard design plan, we could take a saw and cut up the existing 24" wide sidewalk at intervals around every 18" or so. We could then reuse these "blocks" as really big concrete pavers set in a gravel base, as shown below (thanks to Tom for the photos).


We were warned that 18" x 24" sections 4 inches deep turned out to be really heavy, so we'd probably do a thinner section, maybe 10 or 12 high. For our yard, I think it would be neat to kind of stagger sections of concrete, similar to the recycled concrete paver design shown here.

Pros:
Reuse the existing materials on-site
Little to no need for new concrete
Better drainage for stormwater

Cons:
Labor intensive - cutting and making heavy
Winter questions - how will it hold up during snow shoveling?

As other ideas may be less feasible given our modest budget, reusing our old concrete may be a better alternative than leaving things for "next year" as we've been punting on solving the backyard dilemma for four years now. Some of the concrete we have is in really poor shape, especially the stairs leading down to the basement, and need to be fixed this summer. We'll have to seriously consider how well reused pavers would work.

Firmer, but not final, Backyard Plan

I've been meaning to post this for awhile, but here is a more refined version of our backyard plan that we're going with. Now we're starting to get a feel for the costs for redoing portions of the concrete (which need redone badly, especially near house / rear stairs).



The "Dharma patio" may or may not be feasible this year... we'll have to see. Click the image above to view a larger version of this - and kudos to Jen for the excellent digital mock-up using our original plat of survey!

DIY Self-Watering Planters

For Easter, we made a trip out to my mother's house and were treated with a lovely surprise fresh from my stepfather's greenhouse: Nearly mature tomato plants! John provided us with two plants each of the following varieties:

• Heirloom tomatoes
• Cherokee tomatoes (which will be purple)

What a great addition to our garden! When we got home though, I realized that with my somewhat forgetful nature, these mature plants and their containers would need some kind of self-watering system to avoid drying out. So I took some terracotta pots from last season and made some deceptively simple outer containers - all I had to do was plug the drainholes.

I came up with a crafty solution of slicing up an old cork (our running cork collection came in quite handy) into "slices" about 4 mm thick. I then planned to insert that in the bottom of the pot, and seal it like a wine bottle.

Unfortunately, the corks were just bigger than the holes, so I had to make the diameter smaller. Doing this left a bit of a gap between the nice round curve of the pot and the chopped edge of my cork though, so I needed to water proof the cork somehow. I took an old candle that had burned almost all the way down, and dripped wax on top of and around the cork to seal the opening.

After letting the wax cool down for awhile, I tested the seal under the sink and it worked great. Voila! Self-watering containers! Now, the tomato plants, comfy in the plastic containers they came in, each have their own self-watering container that will allow them to "drink" from the bottom if they're thirsty. These should serve the plants well until it is warm enough to move them outside permanently.

In the meantime, I can hardly believe it but they are already beginning to flower. We may have fresh tomatoes from our little urban garden at the start of the season this year!