Shade seekers

Overall we love our house on the park, but there have always been a couple places that we've found a little lacking: there is no basement, which means there's minimal storage space, and there is no good spot for outdoor dining or even just hanging out in the back yard.  We have a sun porch off the dinding room, but the floor of it slopes badly, so putting our picnic table there didn't work.  Also, it gets pretty darn hot there in the middle of summer.  The sun porch opens onto a concrete patio but that too is blazing hot on a summer afternoon.  We've talked about demolishing the slanty sun porch and replacing it with a deck, but we actually get some use out of it as a play room. We've talked about replacing the flower bed on the west side of the sun porch with a patio, where we could take advantage of the shade from the big honey locust tree. And we've talked about building a cover over the existing patio.  The last option makes the best use of the existing structures and the yard, so that's what we decided to do.

During the early spring, we drew up plans and made lists of materials, but as soon as the weather got nice we were too eager to hit the trails to spend time on building projects.  The last weekend in April, however, is the Fruita Fat Tire Festival, an annual event that draws thousands of mountain bikers to the local trails.  The thought of fighting those crowds gave us an incentive to take a biking break and work on our patio instead.  This is how we spent the weekend: