A Conservatory on a Side Porch 
THE SIMPLE TRANSFORMATION THAT MADE POSSIBLE A WINTER INSIDE GARDEN—HOW THE 
PROPER DEGREES OF HEAT AND HUMIDITY WERE MAINTAINED—THE COSTS AND THE RESULTS 
by C. M. Shipman 
S the winter cold comes on and we 
see onr outdoor flower friends 
frosted and disappear, the desire 
possesses us to take some in and 
save them, so we fill our window¬ 
sills with geraniums and the fam¬ 
ily cactus. 
Then we try experimenting 
with bulbs and possibly cyclamen 
and Easter lilies, and, after a few 
years, if we have no success, we 
tire of the game, but if these 
plants do well for us we possibly 
go to dreaming of a small con¬ 
servatory or putting glass around 
the side porch. 
We went through all this pro¬ 
cess, and the flowers did very well; 
the house being heated by steam, 
there were no gases to injure 
them. But we were not satisfied. 
Finally came a time when there 
was not room for all our desires, 
so we decided to enclose the side 
porch. This side porch was on the southwest corner of the 
house; it would have been better on the southeast corner, but it 
did very well. It 
measured seven 
by fourteen, and, 
like the rest of 
the house, was of 
solid concrete— 
floor, wall a n d 
ceiling—s o that 
water could b e 
used freely and 
injure nothing. 
At a neighbor¬ 
ing factory three 
heavy sashes were 
obtained, measur¬ 
ing four feet six 
inches by five feet, 
and two were put 
in the side and 
one at the end, 
giving about six¬ 
ty-six square feet 
o f glass; the 
sashes were held 
in place by a cy¬ 
press strip Y\ by 
4", fastened to 
the concrete by 
anchor - bolts 
screwed in lead, 
and to these the 
sashes were 
screwed so they could be removed in summer, leaving the strips 
permanently there. 
Below the sashes were wooden panels 34'' high, filling in the 
rest of the space and fastened to the inside of the porch rail; 
these panels were also removable. 
The sashes were odd ones in stock, and just what we wanted. 
They cost only $2.20 each. A handy-man carpenter got out the 
cypress in a day and was another day putting it up, at three dol¬ 
lars a day. 
A laborer helped and drilled the holes in the concrete. His 
time was about nine hours, at twenty cents an hour. 
The lumber was odd material the carpenter had; he said: “A 
dollar will square that.” 
Drilling holes in the concrete was quite a difficulty; twentv- 
seven holes 5/16" in diameter and i 1 /a" deep—it took five hours. 
Had the columns been wood, as are the usual piazza columns, 
this would be no expense. 
All the strips and panels were painted before putting up, with 
a paint made of white lead and oil, to which just enough lamp¬ 
black and yellow ochre were added to exactly match the con¬ 
crete. We then put up a miniature hot-house bench, fourteen 
inches wide, around two sides of the conservatory, and at the 
top of the panels, so that the bench came at the bottom of the 
glass. Midway up the windows a shelf was put up. It had a 
rim puttied inside and out and painted so as to be water-proof. 
Thus, in wetting flowers, the excess water could not drip down 
on the flowers be¬ 
low. 
As cold weather 
came on, the two 
oleanders were 
put on the porch, 
and the windows 
and other parts 
put up as de¬ 
scribed, and a 
connection made 
to a radiator just 
inside the door of 
the house by run¬ 
ning a pipe as 
shown in the pic¬ 
ture. This was 
made o f three 
lengths of two- 
inch pipe for the 
main part, and re- 
d u c e d to \Va" 
where it passes 
through the door¬ 
way and connects 
to the radiator in 
the house. An im¬ 
portant factor is 
to have the radi¬ 
ator exactly level; 
from there to the 
connection inside 
Good, rustic effects were obtained by covering the sides of the window boxes with bark strips. The hanging 
baskets and orchids lend a genuine conservatory atmosphere 
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