In the summer and spring, and sometimes the fall, here in Florida it is always warm – even hot. Porches in Florida are a decorative thing with shade.

It’s not often you get to sit on them, its usually buggy and hot. Like New Orleans hot. But around October through February, even March you begin to understand why you moved here in the first place.  The weather is beautiful and as Florida likes to brag, truly a sunshine state.  It is pretty rare that there is overcast like we got up north…. and the skies are so blue.  Of course, Florida is also the land of lakes, lots of lots of them.  Yes, you sometimes curse them as you have to wind around then, roads stopping, starting again…. and Orlando is notorious for crazy roads that go part of a way around lakes that stop suddenly.  But this story is about porches.

Sitting outside on the porch or even the sun porch is just lovely. You read the books you couldn’t outside. You sometimes get a “Florida Room” which was really a screened in porch with glass…. urgh that ugly glass. You know, those small 4″ panes in a louver glass window pattern and then you kind of roll them up to let in the sun and air. NEVER the heat though. Well, we decided to use the glass from an old renno, rather our old house, and put them into the screen windows. They were really the cut glass inserts from doors around our old house that we carted from storage to storage until we found a place where we could use them.  So it was time to get them out of storage and get cracking on this new project.  We really did it last Christmas vacation when my boys were home from college and they could lift those 400 pound doors into place.

We were able to get sliders from Johnson Hardware that allowed them to pass each other. Although we did this last year, we are happy with it now that we are in that time of “Florida Porch” weather.  This year we were able to finally enjoy the porch and we are in the middle of Christmas Decorations, finally bringing out those Thomas the Tank Engine trains that the kids loved when small and those ceramic Department 56 houses we collected long before the bills got crazy…. you know “AK” “after kids” when you no longer had any money. Enjoy the Christmas Holidays!