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Porches are popular, for good reason. Not only do they provide a place to keep muddy shoes out of your house, they create a thermal buffer zone so you don't blow all the warm air out of your house every time you open the front door. If your house is constructed so that the street door opens directly onto living space, as ours is, then a porch also provides a human buffer zone too -- strangers who visit your house can shelter from the elements without coming right into your living room.Because of this popularity, there are now a number of specialist suppliers in the UK of porch (and conservatory) kits. For the most part these are substantially glazed structures with at most a `dwarf' (i.e., low) brick wall. You can buy one of about 6'x4' floor area for around £1000 and, if you're handy, install it yourself in a few days.
The problem with porches like this is that their fishtank appearance doesn't offer much privacy. Consequently, they don't really expand you house, because you can't use them for storage. Our house is rather small, and one reason we needed a porch was to provide a good home for coats, hats, rucksacks, shoes, wellies, and all the other outdoor stuff that was cluttering up the house.
Another problem is that these all-glass, or mostly-glass porches don't really look very nice on older houses. They can look fine on modern houses, which tend to have lots of large windows anyway. But our house is a Victorian railway worker's cottage, and a glass porch would not only not suit the house, it would be completely out of character in the neighbourhood. So for these reasons, I wanted to build a solid-walled porch with small windows in keeping with the style of the house, and a pitched roof as steep as the planning regulations would allow (more on this point later). I wanted a hardwood (not uPVC) door and frame, and guttering that at least bears a passing resemblance to the original black cast-iron stuff.
I also wanted the roof to be made of proper tiles, the same as the main roof of the house. Sadly, the main roof does not have `authentic' Victorian tiles but, rather, modern concrete ones, as the whole roof was replaced just before we moved in. I would have preferred clay tiles to concrete ones, but even concrete tiles are hugely preferable to the imitation plastic ones than many porches seem to have.
The other area where I decided to grit my teeth was in the use of real wood for the fascia, soffits, bargeboards, and trim, and not plastic materials. Plastic is actually more expensive than wood, but has the advantage of being maintenance-free, and ready to install. If you use real wood you need to go through the rigmarole of applying wood preserver, then primer, then undercoat, then several top coats of paint. As paint takes a long time to dry in November, this adds considerably to the complexity and duration of the job. But only wood looks like wood, even when painted with three coats of thick gloss.
I toyed briefly with the idea of building the porch entirely of timber.
This would have been easier (I'm not much of a bricklayer) and the
resulting construction would have been lighter (which would have reduced
the need for a solid block foundation). But I'm not sure it would have
been that much lighter -- the tiled roof alone weighs over 600 pounds, and
that's when it's dry. And I think it would have been awkward to
weatherproof an all-timber porch.
So, in practice, the choice of construction material was between
bricks and concrete blocks. Since I always intended to plaster
inside and outside, the walls would not be visible, so there were
no cosmetic considerations either way. Blocks would be slightly
cheaper, and probably slightly quicker to assemble. In the end
I decided on bricks because I had a feeling that the porch
might remain unrendered for a long time (Winter being firmly
established), and I just couldn't face have an ugly block structure
for any length of time. I might have been inclined to put up with it
if there were, for example, substantial financial advantages.
Complications and compromises
One of the constant irritations with doing this kind of work as an amateur is that you're always working under time and cost pressure. A professional builder who is paid by the day can afford to take an `it takes as long as it takes' attitude. In fact, one of my neighbours is having a porch built of very similar construction and size to mine, and it's taken a local building firm six months so far and it still isn't finished. In my case, I started work in mid-October and set myself a deadline of finishing by the start of Advent. The run-up to Christmas is a very busy time in our household, with school events, Christmas shopping, visiting relatives, and so on; and I couldn't face feeling that I needed to work on the porch over Christmas. This tight schedule, and the fact that I don't have money to burn, meant that I had to make certain concessions.The worst of these, and the one I regret most, was the use of self-adhesive aluminium flashing, rather than lead set into the mortar as would traditionally have been done. I have a feeling I'll be replacing that flashing in a couple of years, either because I don't like it or because it peels off. But it's hugely quicker and cheaper to do the flashing this way.
I also used flashing to cover the ridge of the roof rather than installing proper ridge tiles. This wasn't for cost reasons -- not directly, anyway. But ridge tiles need to be mortared in place, and this would have been a two-handed job, so I would have needed to put up some sort of scaffolding or work platform to avoid any spectacular Mr Bean moments. The ridge isn't really visible, and the flashing is perfectly watertight, but it's not, well, pucker. Anyway, I can always install proper ridges at a later date if the existing construction starts to irritate me too much. One other compromise I should mention: I decided to get help with the bricklaying. I can lay bricks, at a pinch; but I'm excruciatingly slow. A significant complication in the construction is that the ground in front of the house slopes considerably (about 1:4). That doesn't really affect the method of construction, but it does create access problems. The front door of the house is about 9 inches above the ground directly in front of the house, and therefore about 18 inches above the ground level in front of the porch. This meant that I had to construct a doorstep 18 inches high (or, rather, a pair of steps). I could have put the steps inside the porch, and had the porch floor at the same level as the ground; but the steps would have taken up a large part of the floor area of the porch, and made it less practical. But putting the steps outside the porch did create potential planning problems -- more on this, and other planning issues, later.
Planning issues
It seems to me that there is little added effort and expense in constructing a large porch compared with constructing a smaller one; so I decided to make the porch as large as I could without seeking the approval of the Local Authority. I had already discussed this with planning officer, and been told that, if I did submit plans for a larger porch they would almost certainly be rejected. The house has already been substantially extended and, to be fair, a porch much larger than the one I finally settled on would dominate the house, and probably annoy the neighbours. The basic criteria for a porch to escape the planning process (this is not legal advice -- telephone the planning officer) is that it should have a floor area (measured externally) less than 3m2, be less than 3m tall, and be more than 2m from the nearest highway. I had an extended exchange of communications with the Local Authority about the doorstep, of all things. Although the porch building is well within the 2m limit, the steps outside were likely not to be. Eventually, the planning department ruled that the steps did not count for planning purposes, and it did not matter if they were closer than 2m to the street. But, in the end, I decided to make the doorsteps a bit taller and squeeze them closer to the building, avoding this potential problem.In all other respects, the porch sizes are on the very threshold of what the law allows without Local Authority approval, and two adults and two children can put their coats on in it without too much difficulty. Because of the 3m height limit, I was constrained in the steepness of the roof pitch. The pitch of the main house roof is about 40 degrees. However, as you can see in the photos, the porch walls are only just high enough to clear the doorway anyway, and putting a 30 degree pitched roof on top of those walls (allowing for the thickness of the roof construction itself -- about 20cm) takes the porch height to a whisker under 3m. I could not have accomodated lower porch walls by using a less tall front door, because the walls still have to clear the old front door, which is also tall. I could have reduced the roof heigh and still had a steeper pitch by making the porch deeper than it is wide, rather than wider than it is deep. But that would have taken the front edge too close to the pavement. In short, I could not have got a steeper roof pitch than 30 degrees except by compromising in areas I did not want to compromise or breaking the law. 30 degrees is within the recommended pitch range for this type of tile, but I would have preferred it steeper. Oh, well. Another legal consideration of note is that, while there is no strict legal definition of a porch, one thing that is clear is that it must be separate from the house. A porch is effectively an outbuilding that happens to share a wall with the house. You can't, therefore, replace the original exterior door with and interior one and treat the porch as a kind of entrance hall.
Preparation
Not much preparation work was required. I had to remove the orginal front doorstep -- a sledgehammer job -- because it was standing where the porch foundation needed to go. I also had to remove a large section of the block paving in front of the house. Since this kind of paving is usually not mortared down, but just laid on a bed of sand and compacted down, this was straightforward, but left a dispiriting mess. I saved the block paving I removed, not only because some of it would later have to be replaced when making good, but also to make the doorstep. Paving blocks are, rather irritatingly, not the same size as regular house bricks, so they can't be mixed together in the same construction. Not easily, anyhow. Next: foundation slab
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