A Screened Porch and Composite Deck Built for a Tudor style home in Mt. Lebanon, PA

Two people, two different reasons, one project.

For the wife, it was all about the screened porch. She wanted a place of her own outside: somewhere to have her morning coffee, read her books, and do her sewing and knitting without fighting the bugs. She was the driving force behind the porch, and the porch is where most of the design energy went.

For the husband, it was simpler. He wanted a safe outdoor space. The old deck surface had so many problems that you had to watch where you stepped.

Together, the list looked like this:

• A screened porch that stays open and bright, not a dark box tacked onto the back of the house
• A deck surface they never have to stain, paint or worry about again
• The same general layout and multi-level design they already liked
• A finished product that fits a 1922 stone Tudor, which in the homeowner's own words meant "a finished product that fit the style of our home"

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Keeping the deck footprint was the easy decision. Building a new roof onto a 1922 Tudor was not. The Mt. Lebanon permit review went smoothly with no issues. The hard part was on site, where the existing house set the rules.

1. Finding Roof Slope That Wasn't There

In the original layout, the area where the screened porch now sits was a step up from the main deck. A shed roof needs slope to drain, and there wasn't enough height between that raised platform and the existing roofline to get it. So we went the other direction. We lowered the porch floor, and walking from the open deck into the screened porch is now a step down instead of a step up.

That solved the slope, but it created its own limit. The lower we went, the more of the house we exposed below the original stone. From inside the finished porch, you see the home's stone wall. Go any further down and you start seeing foundation. We had to land in the narrow window between enough roof pitch and no exposed foundation, close to the ground on a sloped lot.

2. Tying a New Roof Into a Century-Old Roofline

The new shed roof had to attach somewhere. We ledgered it off the existing roof structure above, which gave us a solid connection to the house. But building a new roofline against an old one creates spots where water collects instead of draining. Left alone, those spots turn into leaks.

The fix was crickets: small framed and roofed ridges built onto the existing roof that split the water and shed it down onto the new roof. On a house with this many intersecting roof planes, we honestly didn't know exactly how it would all work until we started piecing it together. It came out right. Along the way, a few conditions inside the porch only became visible once the roof was framed, and we finished over them so the interior reads clean.

3. Keeping the Screens Open and Bright

The standard approach would be to run the deck handrail straight across the screened openings. We didn't want that. A handrail through the middle of every screen panel makes the porch look busy and makes it harder to see out. Instead, we built our own rail system into the porch framing. It gives the openings a rail while leaving the screens clear, so the porch stays open and bright inside.

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An open deck for gathering and grilling, a screened porch for quiet time, and a set of details that make both look like they came with the house.

Exposed Cedar Rafters, Sourced From Idaho and Milled in West Virginia

This is the detail that defines the porch. A Tudor home is built around visible structure: dark timbers, exposed framing, craftsmanship you can see. A flat, finished ceiling would have fought that. So instead of the Synergy tongue-and-groove ceiling we typically install, we went with an exposed rafter look.

The rafters started as cedar sourced from Idaho. We brought the material here, took it down to a sawmill in West Virginia to have it cut, then brought it back up to the job site in Pittsburgh. Every rafter was stained on site. The photos of the rafters on the sawmill, staged on the job, and finished overhead inside the porch show the whole trip.

A Ceiling That Is Also the Roof

On top of the exposed rafters sits 2x6 tongue-and-groove. It's the finished ceiling you see from inside the porch, and it's also the roof deck. The shingles go directly on top of it, so there's no separate layer of roof sheathing. One material does both jobs, and the underside of the roof becomes the most attractive surface in the room. The roof is finished in architectural shingles.

The Screened Porch

The porch is screened with Screen Eze, using the custom rail system that keeps the screens clear. Inside, it was intentionally kept simple: a ceiling fan, light fixtures, and no TVs or heaters. The homeowners wanted a quiet room, and the cedar overhead is the feature. It's a good example of how we approach screened and covered porches in Pittsburgh: the design starts with how the room will be used, not with a list of add-ons.

PlyGem Trim Painted to Match the House

Every piece of trim on the project is PlyGem PVC: the deck fascia, stair risers, posts, headers and the roof structure. Rather than introduce a new color, we color-matched the home's existing trim and painted the PlyGem to match. From the yard, the porch reads as part of the original house, not an addition. Where the screens meet the posts, we notched the trim to create a small channel for the screen system to sit in. It's a question we hear often, and the trim detail photos show exactly how it's done.

Deckorators Deck and Railing on the Original Layout

The open deck uses Deckorators Voyage decking and Deckorators composite railing in black with a cocktail-style top rail. We kept the deck at about the same size as the original and kept the stairs very close to the original layout, because the stairs already worked with the existing landscaping and plantings. The one change was a new small landing that shifts where you step off the stairs. Keeping what works and replacing what doesn't is a big part of any custom deck replacement in Pittsburgh.

Vertical Skirting

The hillside under the old deck was overgrown with weeds and nothing anyone wanted to look at. We framed it in and closed it off with vertical skirting around the base of the deck. It's a quieter detail than the rafters, but it's what makes the whole project look finished from the yard.

HVAC Screens From Leftover Material

The homeowner mentioned in passing that he hated seeing the air conditioning units from the road. We had extra material left over, so we built screens around the units to hide them. Small request, simple fix, and it means the stone and plantings are what people see first.

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The old deck is the best argument for every material on the new one. Pittsburgh's wet springs, humid summers and freeze-thaw winters work water into wood, and wood that takes on water eventually checks, softens and fails. Years of stain and paint only slowed it down. Every material here was chosen so this deck doesn't follow the same path.

Deckorators Voyage Decking

Voyage is built on Deckorators' Surestone mineral-based composite, and it absorbs virtually no moisture. That's the property that matters most in Western Pennsylvania. Water that soaks into a board and then freezes is what opens up the checks, soft spots and holes the original deck had. Voyage also has low thermal movement, so it handles the swing from a January freeze to a July afternoon without the cupping and gapping that wood shows. No staining, no painting, no sealing every few years.

Deckorators Railing

The original wood railings had worked loose over time. The new Deckorators composite railing in black gives the deck a clean, dark line that ties into the home's timber trim, and it won't need the sanding and repainting the old railings demanded every few seasons.

PlyGem PVC Trim

PVC trim doesn't absorb water, so it won't rot, swell or split at the joints the way wood trim does after a few Pittsburgh winters. It's our standard trim for that reason. Here, it had a second job: painted to match the existing house trim, it lets the new porch and deck carry the home's original color scheme without any of wood trim's maintenance.

Exposed Cedar Rafters

Cedar is naturally resistant to rot and insects, which is why it has been used in exposed outdoor framing for generations. Under the porch roof, the rafters stay out of direct rain and snow, and the on-site stain protects the wood while bringing out the grain. It's the one place on this project where we chose natural wood over an engineered product, and it's protected exactly where it needs to be.

Screen Eze Screen System

Screen Eze holds the screen fabric between an aluminum base and a vinyl cap that snap together, with no staples or spline. That matters long-term. If a panel ever gets damaged, the cap pops off, the fabric is replaced, and the cap goes back on, without tearing out the framing or rebuilding the opening.

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