The Ever Changing Porch!!

When we bought are house, we really like the front porch.  I would call it then a 3 season porch.  It wasn't really functional in the winter but during the rest of the time it was.  We have used it for so many different things it is hard to count.  I LOVE change and am always rearranging and moving things around in our house.  The porch was always a good sport.  Sometimes, I am afraid it was simply a place to put "stuff".  I hated that though because you had to come in it to get in our house!  When I did daycare, it was a nice big area for the kids to play when it wasn't too cold out!  We have even had a hockey table and big basketball hoop out there!  After the hail storm we were given some money from insurance for the porch. Part for the roof that leaked, but mostly because we had to take everything out of the house that way because are sliding glass door was shattered and boarded up.  This meant there was a lot of glass and other stuff that was tracked through.  Anyway, we decided to try to make it a more useful space and divided the porch up.  We left an over sized hallway coming into the house, and created a room on each side.  One room is a bit larger than the other.  For awhile Michael wanted his bedroom out there, but then he decided he wanted to move back upstairs.  So....to my point.....I decided to take Michael's old room area and create a scrapbook room out there.  So far all my stuff is out there, but not organized yet.  Oh, and when we made the rooms, we raise the floors and insulated them and piped heat out there.  The other side was lacking purpose still.  Today I was bored. It is really boring not being able to talk!!  So I took on a new project.  I created a toy room for Carter.  Our house is only so big, our basement isn't really that finishable and so some (alot) of Carter's toys were in our living room.  Also his playhouse was just in storage because we had run out of room for it.  That extra room on the porch seemed like a perfect area and HE LOVES IT!  The whole time since I got it done today he keeps saying "thank you mommy for giving me my own room!"  He has been out there playing for hours!  He absolutely loves "role playing" best.  So I put the house, kitchen and workbench out there for him.  I still have some ideas for it, and I need to paint it, but for now it is a good thing.  This spring we had already decided we needed to put in new windows out there, so that should help it stay even warmer.  I can honestly say now that I don't think there is hardly one space of this house that we have not utilized!!