Our New Front Porch

For the past few months we have been renovating our front porch. This is something that I have wanted to do since we bought our house, but it was put on the back burner because of more pressing home improvement projects.

I had glorious visions of some nice gingerbread scroll work, classic turned porch posts and a new railing to tie things all together. I figure that such an old house needs a beautiful porch, in the correct style of the house, to go along with it. Since our home is turning 100 years old this year we decided to use our tax return money to give our house a nice birthday present.

Here are some BEFORE pictures of the front porch:

We hoped that we could do some cosmetic work and just make things look really cool. A main priority was replacing the porch posts with nice turned wood ones. If you notice in the picture we had some iron posts and then 2 old wood half columns on the ends that didn't even match the others.

But as we started looking at it with our contractor we realized that we needed to do some more basic structural things first. If you notice in the above picture the whole porch sinks down under that middle iron post. When we started looking at it more closely we realized that there was never a footing placed below that post, no wonder it was sinking! All that was holding things up there was an old 2x4 right into the dirt. There were two spots on the porch like that.
Also, if you look in the above picture the whole left side was about 2 inches higher than the rest of the porch and had to be lowered down a bit to straighten things out with the porch and the roof line.
We also knew that there would be layers to peel off before we could even see how the structure below looked. The porch had the original wood planks, then some old green carpet glued right to that, then a layer of plywood on top of that with gray carpet glued to that. The edges of the porch had some aluminum finishing strips that were nailed through the plywood to hide the layers and were constantly popping up and trying to fall off.

There was some dry rot on various parts of the porch, the old wood lattice on the east side was falling apart and the brick pillars were loose. The porch was also in desperate need of some leveling. So, we knew we would have to just tear things out and then see what we were dealing with below all the layers. We hoped that the overall basic structure would be okay and we wouldn't have to replace everything.

The next four pictures show what it looked like when the first layers were taken off and we could see the skeleton of the porch. I was pleasantly surprised with the shape of the wood. We had to replace the entire outside frame and there was some dry rot on some of the end pieces, but luckily we only had to replace 4 or 5 of the inside beams and then cinch the boards along the brick back into the house to make them more sturdy.

The following pictures are what our porch looked like for way too long!! As with any construction projects, things happen and it costs more and takes longer than you initially planned. I have to admit at times I was extremely frustrated with the lack of work that seemed to be going on, or not going on outside my house. We couldn't use our front porch at all for over a month and our back porch leaves little to be desired, so I was very anxious to get this finished!

When the original supports were removed and the 2x4's were put up it took the weight of the porch off the brick supports under the porch. When that happened the mortar just crumbled and we realized that the brick work would have to be redone. It ended up working for our advantage because we used treated 4x4 posts to hold the weight of the porch up and then used the original brick as a facade in front of the 4x4's. Then we had enough brick to cover the 2 new 4x4 supports and footings that were added so everything was tied together and cohesive. The problem was that we had to pay extra for the mason work and it took a long time to complete, so things went very slow.

Here is a picture of my priming station. I made sure that every piece of wood used on our porch was primed before it went in for extra protection from the elements. I was so sick of painting by the end of the project, but I know it was worth it.

Finally some cosmetic work started to show. Here the decking was all put on and the new turned porch posts were mostly up (at least along the front). You can see in the picture below on the left hand side where the old black pillar was removed and you can see the original color of the brick on our house, a kind of tan/yellow. How cool would it be to have the original brick all showing instead of being painted white? Good thing I like classic white houses. :) It's still cool to see the original color of brick. At this point we could start using our front door again. Hooray! A month and a half later.

Don't you love how the new posts just clean things up? I love how much more uniform it feels and how the style of post already adds to the entire look of our house.
Here are the first few brick "pillars" or brick facades that were done. I love that they aren't the painted white bricks anymore and you can appreciate the old original bricks again. Look how nice the posts look! And how straight my porch is! And no more "grass carpet"!!!
This is what it looked like at the end of May right before we painted it. We were still waiting on the brick work and lattice to be finished, but at least we could do our part and get it painted.

And finally some FINISHED pictures of our project! I say finished, but we still need to do a bit of touch up painting (notice the brick on the house behind the last pillar is still not painted white?) along the top of the porch and another coat on the decking. But doesn't it look great?
These two show the colors really well. We chose a brownish gray for the decking that should hide dirt well. We still need to put up a hand rail on the stairs and eventually I still want to do a bit of gingerbread scrolls on the tops of each post and add a railing around the entire thing, but that will have to wait for another time. Can't you just picture it??? How fun will that be?

We tore up the old nasty vines along the east side and added some flowers, the pictures aren't the best to show the nice color that they add. We still need to do some work on the flower beds along the front that were all smashed down and look a bit haggard.

So, it doesn't look like we changed it too much if you just glance at it, but we know that this porch is good for another hundred years. It's straight and clean and well built and we absolutely love it! We know that now whenever we want we can add details to it and not have to worry about whether it will blow down in the next storm. It really adds to the look of our house overall and we are thrilled that it is finally finished!!!
Thanks to everyone who supported us in everything along the way!!! You know who you are!!! Happy 100th Birthday House!!!