Screened Enclosure

Last June I started a new project behind our house.

We have a small area back there where we have our outdoor shower .

I wanted to screen in this whole area, which is sort of an odd shape.

I wanted to spend as little money as possible. I used a bunch of scrap aluminum I've been collecting; aluminum doors, windows and various other pieces of aluminum, some of which is of the type used in screened enclosures. All of the pieces I gathered together have grooves in them for accepting the rubber beading material that holds the screen in place.

I wanted the roof to be slanted so the leaves and stuff would slide down rather than collecting up there on the screen. So I designed it as sort of a dome. See drawing below. The actual 'dome' is a round piece of convex smoky glass I came across at a flea market once. It's the highest point of the enclosure. It's mounted to a 7-sided aluminum frame which is connected to the rest of the frame.

The enclosure is connected to my workshop on the west side. On the south and east sides, it's connected to the house. And the north and north-east sides are screened 'walls' that come all the way to the ground.

The only things I had to buy for this project were a few bags of cement for a footer under one of the exterior screen doors, and the rubber beading for installing the screen to the frame. I had all the other materials, including the screen material and the hardware, in my scrap pile and my hardware bins & drawers. Junking and curb-side shopping doesn't provide you with brand new materials, but it can save you a lot of money. People throw away all kinds of good stuff.

Drawing of roof for screened enclosure.

My webpage died

I've had a website for a few years. The server was apparently owned by an individual rather than a hosting company. Things went along fine until late last year when I started having problems with the site. I emailed the guy and got no response. This seemed kind of strange because up until then, I had always gotten rapid responses from this guy, whose name was John.

Well, after a couple of weeks of trying to contact John, I did a little research on his name and found out he had died. I couldn't find out what the circumstances of his death were, but it was pretty obvious that he was gone. It was then that I realized that John didn't have any kind of backup plan for his web hosting service. Maybe the server was in his basement, I don't really know.

At any rate, without somebody to maintain things, my website continued to deteriorate until it no longer worked at all. And I'm paid up until this September so not only did I lose my website, I also lost a little money. I don't hold this against John, but it would have been nice if his web hosting business was more than just a one man operation.

The moral of this story is that if you are going to open a website, be sure you do it with a company that is operated by more than one man.

I still have my domain name and I could open my site again with another web hosting service, but I just haven't gotten around to doing that yet. I guess I keep hoping that somebody will come to the rescue of John's web hosting service, which was http://2serveu.net/.