Me too. I’ve been imagining everyone in craftsman homes with original built in benches and table!
Most families I knew growing up had breakfast rooms, a smaller, more casual version of the dining room. It was for breakfast and lunch. The dining room was for dinner. For large holiday gatherings, the children ate in breakfast room, adults in dining room… I had a breakfast room and dining room in the house where we raised our kids. Both rooms got heavy use.
To me, a porch is a covered space attached to house and wide enough for furniture. It can be screened. A glassed in porch is a sunroom, or maybe a conservatory.
My grandmother’s house has a huge eat in kitchen, large breakfast room with built-in corner cupboards and bay window, then formal ding room with French doors to side porch… all in a row where you walk from kitchen straight through. Children ate in the kitchen for holidays.
When we bought our house it was around 3400 sf which was more than big enough for two people. A few years after we bought it we adopted our daughter and the house was still comfortably roomy. Several years after that my invalid mother came to live with us. Still probably enough room, but with all of the visitors who came to visit Granny we needed some extra guest space so we converted an attic space into living quarters. Now we have 4000 sf - Granny recently passed away and in a couple of years daughter will be off to college. Husband and i will probably end up using the kitchen, hearth room (TV’s in there), one bathroom and bedroom. We are going to have a lot of extra rooms that are unused.
Porches are in the front, decks are in the back (or side, or somewhere in the yard not attached to the house). Both can be covered or uncovered, but both are built above the ground. Patios are ground level, in contact with dirt, typically stone or brick.
Kitchen nook usually means a space in or immediately next to the kitchen for a table in addition to formal dining room. If there is no formal DR, the space is not called a nook. It is usually advertised as a family room with dining area. Those built in benches with a table are always advertised as built ins.
Dictionary says porch is covered. If someone wants to clarify with “covered porch,” it’s just one extra word. Nook: corner or recess. The little room separate from the DR, is often a “breakfast room.” This isn’t a table inside the kitchen boundaries. Nor a family room. If your “breakfast room” is actually a separate nook, a recess separate from kitchen or DR, not a room space, fine, call it a nook.
I call the space in front of my front door the front porch. It’s up the stairs, uncovered. It’s not living space.
Oh yeah. Forgot. Decks can also be on the roof! Rooftop decks are the new hot thing in RE here in Seattle. Hmmm… flat roof, giant maple leaves, fir needles, and inches and inches of rain. What could possibly go wrong here? We decided not to bid on one house that had Appian type decking installed over a flat garage roof. Water was collecting under the pavers and seeping through poorly installed membrane… destroying the fake stucco stuff on the side. Not a fan of rooftop decking in my own house, but I will gladly party on other folks’ rooftop decks.
4 years ago, I moved from the Midwest to CA with my 14 and 12-year-old kiddos directly on the heels of a divorce. The major cost of living adjustment meant a big downsize from the spacious 4-bedroom colonial on a half-acre lot where they had grown up. I have great memories of the old place, mostly because of my neighbors who became life-long friends over many coffee/ wine/ playdate/ camping trips/ deck crawls/ and block parties. It wasn’t quite time to downsize, but now I’m glad it is behind me.
My new place is a nondescript 1200 sqft 1960s tract house on a busy street, but I love (and use) every bit of it. All of the rooms were too small for the old furniture, so I had to purge almost everything and buy new. It was fun for me and the kids to start fresh, and now everything fits and is functional. I repurposed the garage as a hang-out space for my son and his friends, and they are always here on weekends and after school. I converted the carport off the back to a screen porch, and with the addition of a ceiling fan and electric blankets, it is a wonderful retreat for me all year.
There’s room in the back yard for a detached studio apartment. If I ever need to house an aging parent, or if kiddos start families and visit often, I will build one. Otherwise, I already have all the space I need and not one sqft more.
Lookingforward, together with the fake stucco remediation (which requires tenting the entire house), it would have been a $200k project. I suppose we would have saved a few bucks by DIY, but we decided to pass. Some Chinese investor bought the place sight unseen. Lol.
Dictionary says a porch has a roof. It generally has no walls, but screen porches have screens and sun porches are mostly windows. (The building code calls sun porches sunrooms - they have >40% glazing.) Veranda and Lanai are as far as I can tell regional terms for porches. A patio is a paved area. If it’s raised above the ground level, it called a raised patio (largish area with room for chairs) or raised platform (small area in front of entries). Decks in gardens are raised above the ground and usually (but not always made of wood. Deck is a general construction term for and flat structural element - hence roof deck.
This brought up a few memories for me; it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I learned a mango was actually a green pepper! My mother always called them mangoes, and the local grocer labeled them as such! She wasn’t the only one (https://www.thepacker.com/article/great-green-pepper-mango-mystery)
My grandparents had what they called a front porch and a back porch. The back porch even had a large porch swing, so I thought a porch could be either front, back, or both as long as it had a roof.
Where I live now, the back area is called a patio if it’s uncovered and a covered patio if there’s a roof.
“Where I live now, the back area is called a patio if it’s uncovered and a covered patio if there’s a roof.”
We have a front and back porch (covered) and that’s what they are referred to. Ours are open but if they had screens, they’d be called screened in porches.
Growing up, we had a parlor and a den not a living room and a family room (old house). Not sure if those terms are regional or just old-fashioned?
Also, many childhood friends had finished rooms in the basement that were called the rec room. Can’t remember hearing that term in awhile.
We decided not to bid on one house that had Appian type decking installed over a flat garage roof. Water was collecting under the pavers and seeping through poorly installed membrane… destroying the fake stucco stuff on the side. Not a fan of rooftop decking in my own house, but I will gladly party on other folks’ rooftop decks.