laundry room

For eight months we’ve had no walls in the back porch. Well, you can see ‘walls’ with gaps in them in the photo because the back porch is a laundry room with a bathroom, so those are cedar wood planks in our little bathroom on the porch.

The previous walls were made of 12 inch wide pine tongue and groove planks–the same thing on the floors in the first floor of our house–except for the kitchen where there was linoleum. So we sacrificed wood walls on the back porch for wood floors that matched the rest of the house in the kitchen. The trees for the wood were bought on the NC coast and milled here at the sawmill on our property 30 some years ago. So there was no dropping by the flooring store to match the floors.

See how you can see light coming through the wood planks in the top photo? Our temporary solution to create privacy in the porch bathroom was to nail up random scraps of wood and bungee cord up big pieces of cardboard so our friends and family could do their business without worrying about the little gaps in the wall.

back porch process

porch 'walls'

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Aren’t we clever?

It was a great fix that first day. Then months went by.

Then one day two weeks ago, Chad had just started working on the pool to get it back from Loch Ness green to blue and he walked in the back porch and told me that the pool pump, one of the three things in this house that actually worked when we purchased it, wouldn’t turn on and I. Lost. It.

That was the straw.

Something came over me and I walked into that porch, ripped out the cardboard “wall” to this bathroom, threw it into the yard where the boys & Chad were and screamed at the top of my lungs that I can’t live in a house that needs this much work any longer. {insert Nellie Oleson voice & hair bows}.

I threw a fit. A tantrum. I had a moment.

I declared that we WILL have walls on the porch in the next week and that pool WILL be blue in two weeks. I’m not sure what my consequences would be, but empty threats screamed at the top of my lungs actually made me feel better and then I went in and made pizza because it was Friday. And then at dinner I apologized for my screaming fit.

I’m not proud of my behavior but I am saying this. Three days later I had walls going up.

back porch

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waiting

This is the last wall patiently waiting to be made whole again. Once all the walls are up, I’m priming and painting this room white maybe with grey trim. It’s the first room everyone sees when they walk into our house, no one ever comes to our front door so this is basically our front porch. Nothing says Welcome to our Home like a toaster oven on top of a dryer in front of a wall made of insulation. Am I right?

i don't always have walls