The Honest Courtesan

The last big project I did before leaving for my road trip was screening the large atrium windows and the small porch on the north side. I’ll show you the latter next week, but here’s the inside view, in which you can kinda see the screen; though the screen itself isn’t really visible, if you look closely you can see that the images beyond the screen are somewhat blurry and pixelated due to the intervening mesh.  I decided to use the fiberglass screen rather than the old-style metal, due to it being easier to work with and more forgiving (there was no good way to unwarp the traditional stuff if it got bent).  The wooden walls above the windows are made from leftover cottage roof boards, which are tongue-and-groove and were therefore perfect for this purpose. I also did a rather good job (if I must say so myself) on the trim boards I used to hide the edges of the screen on the outside; I’ll probably show you those sometime in August or September, when I make the shutters we’ll use to close up the windows for the cold, rainy season from October to April. As a native of south Louisiana, I’m fond of screen porches, but due to our climate I had to come up with a climate-appropriate compromise; I’m very pleased with how it all came out, and it’s already dramatically reduced the number of flies in the atrium.