A beautiful natural stone porch attracts covetous glances of your neighbours. This is where you many of your beautiful moments with family and friends are captured and shared. A porch may be a partially open or enclosed space covered by glass windows or wooden pickets in front of your home. On hot days, this can be an ideal place to let your body cool.

Designing a perfect porch needs careful planning, choice of materials, and installation. Here are some tips to design and build a perfect porch for your home.

Draw a plan

It is always wiser to start any project with a plan, as bringing out ideas on paper does not cost you money. Apart from saving you a lot of time and effort, it ensures your porch looks great and personalized.

Get required materials

It is essential to keep the essential things ready instead of searching them when the work progresses. Natural stone, coarse and fine sand, gravel, trowel, rope, screed board, tape measure, circular saw with diamond chips, plate compactor, and pry bar are the required things for building a natural stone porch.

Choosing a natural stone

Every natural stone has a personality –granite shows resilience, marble looks royal and trendy, whereas soapstone feels soft, and travertine oozes delicate and rustic feel. A limestone imparts a blend of countryside and modern appearance to your floor.

Apart these impressions, a natural stone’s porosity, pattern, and strength render it useful for different applications. Price is also a factor to choose between these stones – marble and granite fall in the costly-medium, limestone and slate in the medium, while travertine in the low range.

Some prefer square or rectangular stone, whereas others opt for irregular ones. Sometimes if you order 1 inch thick slabs you may receive 0.5 or 1.5 inch slabs as well. Uniformly thick stones reduce your efforts. If the porch is meant for heavier usage, such as car parking you need to get 2 inch slabs.

Here are the steps to build porch

• Level the area meant for the porch
• Fill the area with 4 inch thick layer of medium-size gravel
• Level the surface using a creed board and a plate compactor
• Cover it with 2-3 inch thick layer of coarse sand and level it using screed board
• Start placing tiles from one side without disturbing the sand, maintaining 0.5 inch distance between the joints using a pry bar
• Fill the spaces in the joints with fine sand using trowel

Alternatively, you can use concrete to install the stones, or wooden framework for wooden plank floors. A great porch adds to the looks of your home. Avoiding vacuum pumps or strong water sprays for cleaning the porch surface ensures they look beautiful and last longer.

Also Read: Paver stone types and their Installations