More renovations

Early on in the pandemic we made a "to do" list for the house. My thought was that if we had something tangible to focus on it would keep our minds off the crazy.  It would help me think less about the fact that I have camped zero times this summer, hung out with friends zero times this summer been to the beach zero times this summer, seem my mother zero times this summer. . . You get the idea.

The biggest project we decided to tackle was our front porch.  I binge watched youtube vids and shared them to my wife, pumping up her enthusiasm (while she pretty much enjoys this journey now she was a lot less confident than I was that we could do these things.)  And initially, our project pretty much mirrored the helpful videos that we saw.  I got myself an orbital hand sander and got the beams sanded and we painted to a fair thee well.  I ripped up old flooring and sanded the floor.  We inspected said floor for damages.  And just like the videos there was a small section that needed repair.  

Armed with my boundless enthusiasm and said videos we pulled up the punky boards and discovered!  A missing joist.  Hmmm. Odd but this is an OLD porch on a 200 year old house.  Stranger things have been found working on this house.  We put in a new joist where there was not one, we married a new sturdy 2 x 4a to a less sturdy one and framed it in nicely.  Doesn't it look lovely?

Then we removed the last punky board and discovered that the support post to our porch was disintegrated.  As in, 40 years of hard living had turned it to dust.  I called a good friend in a panic.  He came over and looked and said well Sh### !  There was talk of jacking the house and contractors and all I could see were dollar signs.  And lets face it, while working on my home in the pandemic is fun--I am still very mindful of our money right now.  My wife is only recently back to most of her work. My middle son is not back yet.  And unemployment tanks next week unless there is a miracle. But back to the porch.

We called another friend.  He loves old housing and works for  a contractor.  One of my big worries was losing the fancy gingerbread trim if the whole post had to be replaced.  Yes, he agreed, nodding sagely, that would be horrible and very expensive to save.  However it was not clear if we would have to replace the whole post.  It was possible that this damage was caused by faulty gutters and moisture and that it only went part way up.

A glimmer of hope!  Back to youtube I went.  The next week armed with a 4 x 4 fence post that we got free from a job site my wife worked at, some 2 x 4s and a lot of prayers we went to town on the porch. We dug out all the punky wood.  We discovered good and bad things.  Bad.  There was no real footing for the porch post.  Good. The post was not a single entity.  At some point my grandfather had replaced the bottom half of the post with a couple of 2 x 4s joined together.  

We debated trying to make a nice footing for our post.  But as you can tell from the picture there was not a lot of room to dig.  I would have to use a hand trowel and I would likely still be there. LOL

In this picture you can see that I braced the porch with a 2 x 4 and inset my fence post.  We set the post on bricks which was the "footing" my grandfather had used. Why mess with what worked for 40 plus years?  We also had to take off that weird green stuff which was a thin, sort of papery backing board that he used before putting the finish boards over it.  My guess is it was all they could afford and it most definately was not rated for exterior work.  We took it off (but only in that section, I am not up for redoing the whole porch!) and put up exterior rated backing board.

Here's the exterior backing board we installed and you can also see that we had repaired the floor at this point as well.  It was starting to look like we would finish and that it was going to come out ok!

And it did!  Here is the repair with the new finish boards, ready for painting. (they have since been primed and I will paint this weekend.)  I will also paint that small area beside our repair where my paint was damaged by having to open the wall up. All in all it was about 8 hours of work and 5 trips to hardware stores as our efforts revealed new and different issues to address.  I should also mention that we don't own a power saw.  This stuff was hand cut, though we do have a drill and a few other small power tools.  I am beginning to dream about a small table saw set up!

Aside from painting the repair our next part of the project is making screens.  Another new skill to learn.  And yesterday the gutters were replaced so hopefully the water issue will also be a thing of the past.