At six-thirty this morning the screened porch was the only bearable place in the house that wasn't air-conditioned. Ben sat in one rocker with his coffee, I sat in the other, and Pepper lay flat on the cool painted floor between us with her ears spread out like a rug. A month ago that scene wasn't possible. The porch was where we kept the recycling, a broken bike and a lot of good intentions. Now it's where we spend the best hours of a South Carolina summer, and the whole makeover came to $187.
Where we started
Our back porch is about ten feet by fourteen, screened on three sides, with a ceiling fan that came with the house and a concrete floor somebody once painted gray. When we bought the place in 2021, it was one of the things that sold us. Then life happened, and it slowly became storage. By this June there were two tears in the screen, a mud dauber nest in one corner, a green film on the floor along the north side, and one folding chair that pinched.
We set two rules: spend under $200, and don't start any project we couldn't finish in a couple of weekends. A porch you're working on all summer is a porch you can't sit on.
What we did
Cleared it out completely
Everything came off the porch, including the broken bike, which finally went to the curb with a "free" sign and was gone in an hour. The recycling bin moved to the carport where it belonged in the first place. Just seeing the empty floor made the porch look twice as big.
Scrubbed the floor
The green film along the north side was mildew, which grows on anything shady and damp around here. I scrubbed it with a stiff deck brush and a bucket of water with a little oxygen bleach mixed in, then rinsed it out the screen door with the hose. Two rounds took most of it. We considered repainting the floor and decided against it, partly for budget and partly because a clean old floor looked perfectly fine.
Patched the screens
Both tears were small enough to patch rather than rescreen. A repair kit with pre-cut patches and a roll of matching screen cost less than ten dollars, and each patch took about five minutes. Ben also went around the frame with the screen spline roller pressing back the spots where the screen had pulled loose. Mosquitoes in July are not a small consideration, so this was the most important job on the list.
Found rocking chairs
Every Southern porch deserves a pair of rockers, and I'd been watching for them for weeks. A family down the street set two wooden ones at the curb during a move. One had a cracked slat that Ben replaced with a piece of scrap from the shed. I sanded both, and we painted them a soft white with exterior paint left over from an older project. Free chairs, a little sweat.
What it cost
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Screen repair kit | $9 |
| Oxygen bleach and a deck brush | $22 |
| Indoor-outdoor rug, 5x7 | $54 |
| Two seat cushions for the rockers | $36 |
| Outdoor string lights | $24 |
| Small side table, thrift store | $12 |
| Two ferns for hanging baskets | $18 |
| Sandpaper and a new paintbrush | $12 |
| Total | $187 |
The rug made the biggest difference for the money. It's a simple striped pattern made for damp places, and it softened the concrete and defined a sitting area that hadn't existed before.
Making it work in July
A porch in our climate has to earn its keep in the heat, not just look pretty in a photo. A few things that make ours usable even now:
- The ceiling fan runs whenever anyone is out there. It also does more against mosquitoes than anything we've tried. They're weak fliers.
- The ferns get watered every morning. Boston ferns love the humidity but dry out fast in a breeze, and two hanging baskets of green make the whole porch feel ten degrees cooler, even if it isn't.
- The cushions come inside during storms. Afternoon thunderstorms blow sideways rain right through the screens, and soggy cushions mildew fast.
- The string lights are on a timer. They switch on at dusk, which has become our unofficial signal that it's cool enough to go sit outside.
One thing that didn't work
I bought a cheap citronella candle in a bucket, thinking it would help with bugs. It didn't, much, and the smell gave Ben a headache. It's on the shed shelf now, where it can repel nothing in peace.
This week has been noisy inside the house. A contractor is up in the attic sealing our ductwork, a fix that came out of a free energy audit in May, so there's been a lot of thumping overhead and a ladder in the hall. The porch has been our refuge. Lila, who is six, has started calling it "the outside room" and asking to eat supper out there every night. Most nights we say yes.
This evening, after the dishes, we sat out there until it got fully dark. The lights came on, the fan ticked, and somewhere in the pecan trees a whip-poor-will started up. Two hundred dollars well spent, with thirteen left over for ice cream.
