Volume XVI 
November, 1909 
Number 5 
Enclose your porch with glazed sash, furnish it informally and make use of this important part of your house during the winter months 
Using the Porch all Winter 
A SUGGESTION FOR MAKING USE OF THE MOST ENJOYABLE FEATURE OF THE 
HOUSE EVERY MONTH IN THE YEAR INSTEAD OF ONLY IN THE SUMMER 
by Henry H. Saylor 
Photographs by J. T. Beals and M. H. Northend 
I T is a very strange thing, when you come to think of it, 
that we Americans have, in the main, been perfectly satis¬ 
fied to give up the use of our porches for the greater part of every 
year. In no other country in the world has the porch been 
accepted as such an indispensable part of home life as in the 
United States. We spend upon it the greater part of our waking 
hours from June through September — not to mention the increas¬ 
ingly great use we make of the porch in our sleeping hours as well. 
And yet, when the cooler days and chilly evenings of October come 
around we give it up with scarcely a murmur, and take refuge in 
the darker, less cheerful and less healthful portions of our homes 
on the other side of the front door. One would think that our 
Yankee ingenuity would long ago have devised some means of 
getting around our climate in this regard, and yet the instances 
where this has actually been done are so few as to be actually 
noteworthy. 
And the strangest part of it all is that the solution of the 
problem is so very easy. In the mosquito-infested parts of the 
country it has long since become the customary thing to do to 
enclose the whole porch, or a portion of it, with screens to keep 
out the insects, yet the enclosing of the same space with glazed 
sash in winter to keep out the cold — or, to be more accurate, to 
keep in the warmth — is remarkably uncommon. 
I suppose that a study of a number of typical house plans 
would disclose the fact that from one-fifth to one-quarter of the 
area occupied by the first floor of a house is occupied by porch 
space. Leaving out of consideration the upper stories, for the 
reason that they are used primarily and almost exclusively as 
sleeping quarters, this brings the realization that we are actually 
losing the use of about eight per cent of our house during the 
hours when we are up and about. An eight per cent loss on any 
other kind of investment would surely not have gone unchallenged 
this long. Why it is almost, if not quite, as bad and without 
reason as that very amusing custom of our not far distant ancestors, 
when they kept closed and musty and dismal the largest and best 
located room of the house — the front parlor, excepting upon the 
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