Porch Lighting

When I was building the porch I had some wire run for future lighting options. Between the shade from the nearby trees, the roof of the porch, and the porch's location on the eastern side of the house, that area just doesn't get much light.

That said, when I drew up the plans and submitted them for permitting, I didn't give the lighting much thought -- at the time I figured I'd drop a few small can lights (the soffit lights are a whole other story) in the ceiling and be done with it. Since I hadn't yet built the porch, I didn't have a big structure to eyeball and think through what would look good and what wouldn't. 

But let's call a timeout on the light talk for a minute. 

I took a week off of work at the end of August just to burn through some vacation days. I'll undoubtedly spend a LOT of time on the scaffolding repairing the brick wall I'm currently working on.

If you follow my Instagram stories, you may have seen the one I posted recently showing the catastrophe that is the house's parapet "cap" -- nothing but spray foam and liquid flashing slopped all over the top of the wall. As part of the wall rebuild, I'm going to address that, at least in the little section of wall I've currently got torn apart.

​Typically and/or historically, those walls get capped with clay wall coping (like the garage has, or had before a recent storm dropped a big tree limb on some of them):

or they get capped with some kind of precast stone like this:

I've been wrestling with which route to go. The clay coping is the less expensive option, faster to install, and historically correct. But the house has a double brick cornice with lots of detail, and I think the clay coping - it's shape and protruding overlap section - would look weird, like there'd be too much going on visually. 

The precast option is pricey and while still historically correct, not a fast installation.

So I've been mentally wrestling with that throughout this current wall project because I need to make a decision soon on which product to buy. 

Let's go back to porch lighting, which I want to tackle during my time off. Thinking through the details and designs of the different wall cap options got me to thinking about the porch lighting. Do I really want can lights? Would they look OK? Would they even make sense?

Now that the porch is fully constructed, I can say with 100% certainty that can lights would look ridiculous. Everything about the porch screams pre-1900, can lights in the porch ceiling would be architectural blasphemy. I should have thought through this sooner, like back when I was drawing the plans...but here we are. At least the wires are already up in the ceiling.  

I've been internetting some period correct-ish lighting options, which come down to surface mounted fixtures with big circular globes, or pendant style fixtures that are kinda warehousey.

I'm kind of partial to the surface mount option - material finish still TBD - with the big globe, I think it'd look better in the center of the porch ceiling than a pendant style light. But I don't hate the pendant option, and it'd get some light a little closer to the porch floor, which is about 10'6' away from the ceiling.  

Either way, I've got a handful of days before I have to make a choice...