From some of the responses I received when I posted this photo on Instagram, I gathered that you all might have thought we were just doing a little patio decor makeover.
Well, my friends, you were wrong. We're doing a major patio overhaul!
We've thought long and hard about what we wanted to do with the space we have in our back yard. There's plenty of room for a pool, and we went back and forth on that idea. While it would be nice now as the kids are in their teen years, ultimately we didn't want the daily maintenance or expense of a pool- especially since we have a neighborhood pool just a few blocks away.
However, we do entertain fairly often, and decided that we wanted to extend our space outdoors and expand the usable space there for a spacious, functional outdoor living area.
As I mentioned in my first patio post, Emily's porch at Eleven Gables has been a huge inspiration for what we wanted to do. Emily is a talented designer, able to design and draw up plans from square one for any building project, and she's been kind enough to walk me through this remodel. If you're local to the Oklahoma City metro area and need design work done, Emily's your girl! We're willing to tackle our fair share of DIY projects, but we decided to leave this one to the pros. With Emily's help, we're sub-contracting each part of the job out ourselves.
So... after dreaming with Emily and meeting with a framer, here's the plan we've
To start with, we're extending the floor about 10 more feet all the way across out into the yard. We're also removing the flower bed that is around the curved section of the patio under the pergola and squaring that entire area off to now be included in the patio.
So, here's a birdseye view of the new footprint- (totally my amateur drawing!)
The top side is the living/kitchen wall and the bottom edge will be where the patio meets the yard. This new addition will give us roughly 750 square feet of patio space!
Originally I planned to extend the brick flooring to include all of the new square footage, but as we talked and thought, we agreed that tearing out all of the brick and pouring one big concrete slab would be our best option.
I know some of you are cringing right now at the thought of removing the brick, and I LOVE the brick, so I'm with you. However, we wanted the new patio to be all one level (it was 2 before), so we were going to have to demo 1/2 of the area anyway. And, with all of the brick on the house and what would be around 750 square feet of brick on the ground, that's a LOT of brick (cost-wise and aesthetic wise). We decided that we would like the variation of the concrete flooring against the brick house instead, but will likely add a brick edge around the slab to tie it all together with the brick on the house. Lastly, while beautiful, the brick flooring was hard to keep clean... all those grooves are hard to sweep! So, sorry brick lovers- but stay with me, it will all turn out fine in the end!
After the floor is expanded, we'll extend the existing covered roof to increase the amount of covered space.
The dotted line in my drawing above will be the new roofline, and here's a rough sketch that the framer made depicting another angle.
We will extend the current hip roof out about 6 more feet. In addition, we'll remove the pergola (that's past it's prime) and add an entirely new section of roof in that area.
Once again, we used Emily's roof as a guide. We're using the same framer, so he will make our new roof section where the pergola was look similar to this side of Emily's: (snapped with the phone on a quick visit for ideas-not her pretty pics!)
And from the front it will look similar to this. Our hip roof will attach along the right side where Emily's chimney is.
The framer assures us that it won't look like an "add-on", and will look like it's always been there. Important when you're doing renovations.
All of the roofing changes will leave us with a large covered patio all the way across the back, and a bit of space that is not covered, as well. When the air gets chilly I'll want to pull my chair into the sun!
Finally, we plan to add a brick fireplace along the right-hand side of the patio. I'll share more about that in the future.
When an agreement with our first concrete and demo contractor went south (still dealing with that one), we decided to begin a little bit of the demo ourselves that he was supposed to do. So, we ("we" meaning my husband) disassembled the pergola and cut down most of the wisteria.
After finding another concrete contractor, this is where we were at the time that he came in to do his job. His crew would be doing all of the brick demo, clearing the remains of the flowerbed and wisteria, and preparing the foundation for the new concrete slab before it was time to pour it.
In the next update I'll share our progress so far!
