Four score and three summers ago … well at least 2 years and three summers … I bought my 114 year old house. Needless to say, I’ve done a hell of a lot of work on it. I won’t bore you with the list—but it is long!
This summer between the heat & my chronic fatigue, I didn’t do a whole hell of a lot. Even the weeds in my garden beds were taunting me. Sure. Why not.
So as things got cooler as we slipped into Fall, I decided to do something I had planned on from day one: transform the front porch. The porch served me well; but it had to go!
Even with the cooler weather I still see in my minds eye how I wanted to transform it. The porch itself was pretty poorly built. They didn’t use joist hangers & not all the posts are on concrete pads. So there is this nice “dip” at the stair area. Nice!
I had no intention of fixing these mistakes. I would have have to tear down and rebuild the entire porch. Not happening! Mostly because of cost and it’s something I would have had to hire and pay someone several grand to complete. So I opted to just do a more cosmetic facelift—and work within my abilities & budget.
First thing to do was tear there roof of the sucker! Well … more like take down all the railings & support posts, etc. From there I bought a 4.5″ wide belt sander and sanded 95% of all the old paint off the remaining lumber.
One of the main reasons I also tore apart the porch was because a groundhog had made a home under the front porch. I saw the sucker running around the back yard earlier in the summer and thought: “Oh how cute!” That’s of course until the kids next door told me they saw it run under my front porch. I tried to trap it, but ended up with an opossum instead. Wildlife in the burbs of Kansas City! Oi!
I had also noticed that the groundhog had chewed through the wood lattice in at least four places. The lattice is supposed to keep critters out—yeah right! That was the imputes that started this porch project.
When I did take off the four wood lattice pieces, I saw the nasty groundhog had dug an 8 foot deep hole/nest under the porch right next to the foundation. Little furry fuck! Grrrrr.
I put a hose down the hole & figured if the furry sucker was still down there, he’s run out—or drown. I didn’t care one way or another. . Only thing it did was put water in my basement. WTF???? So yeah … I was pissed. But it was gone! So I backfilled the hole/tunnel with as much dirt as I could push in and topped it off with a foot of pee soaked clumps of kitty litter. The Interwebs said that was a good deterrent so the sucker wouldn’t come back while I was working on new wire screen covers & the remainder of the porch.
The idea of the design was to use some of the cattle fence I used for my yard fence to tie the two visually together. I also thought it would look cool. I also decided against gray & went with white and two shades of blue.
That was how this whole thing started.
All of the new lumber used was cut to size, primed, and painted before construction, so every face was protected from the elements. I later did another coat when things were in place and secured.
This morning I finished constructing the stair railings & installed them. That was a lot of angle cuts and wild times getting the fence cut to fit correctly. I think that was the hardest part of this whole project.
So … it’s “almost” done. I still need to do touch up painting. May paint the top hand rails blue, like the floor. But we’ll see. May just leave it white. The dark blue may heat up too much in summer and burn hands. Maybe I answered my own question. Love when that happens!
And that’s that. Another project complete! I really do like the end result.
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