Trim to Dress Up the Screened Porch
A client of mine had just had a new screened-in porch added on to her home. She asked me to add some trim around the outside to ‘dress it up a little’. I was happy to help.
I didn’t have to do much to make a dramatic effect from the basic porch design that I started with. The goal was to just add some arched pieces of cedar over each ‘window’ like my client had seen in a magazine.
To begin, I bought some long 1×6 cedar boards and cut them to the width of the opening. Next, I had to make the curve for the arch. To do this, I found a thin piece of wood that could easily be bent to make a curve. At the center of the board I measured out a certain amount that would be the depth of the curve. This was the same for each piece that I made. Then, I held my flexible wood piece so that it crossed both corners at the end of the board and made a curve crossing the mark I made in the middle. Tracing this makes the curve!
I cut out the curve with my jigsaw and then use my router to make a nice decorative edge across the bottom. Then I’m ready to tack it into place and move on to the next one. Even though the pieces may each have a different width, by making the arch have the same depth to it, the trim looks uniform.
You could paint the trim, but for this porch I just left it to weather naturally. An easy project with great results.
