www.intermod.org: The Porch Rebuild

We've been planning this project for a long time.

We've got a brand new front porch and the Halloween weekend event will be christening it for us. To the left is a picture of what it looks like now, post rebuild, and to the right is what it looked like before. Probably doesn't seem like much of a difference to you, but pretty much everything underfoot was completely rotten or otherwise unnavigable, and I hated the old columns. All that has been replaced and we can now have people tramping across our porch without us worrying about them falling through into the basement! Or falling off the edge, because there was no railing before either. And the steps don't strike fear in the hearts of elderly anymore. And so on.

First up was the demolition and rebuild of the front steps. The old lower section had been poured in place, but over time part of it had settled, to the point where the amount of "rise" for each tread was basically a random number between 6 and 10 inches. The old upper section was a strange prefab design, made of formed concrete piece fitted together. The steps were actually evenly spaced, but the whole thing basically felt loose, and when you stepped on it the sections would clatter a bit, making a disconcerting hollow rattle. Altogether, this made for a worrisome adventure for pretty much any visitor.

When a construction project gets going, it's really impressive how fast it can move along. The steps were demolished in a couple hours one day, and then one day later that week the wooden form for the new steps was built, and on the third day there was a 4 hour period when the concrete was poured in and the steps finished off. (yes, the concrete subcontractor lead guy is in a wheelchair)

Next up were the columns. We wanted to keep the old brick columns but the tops needed to come up in height a bit. It's hard to match brick and mortar between old and new brick, so the old columns were torn down and rebuilt. In the meantime, the roof overhead was held up by a couple 2x4's, anchored onto a floor that was completely rotten, so that pretty much scared the crap out of me. Visions of half-collapsed house dancing in my head.

The original plan for the floor had been to rip up the floorboards and replace them, but keep the joists / substructure, since they had looked fine from our inspection via the basement. But when the contractor actually got the floorboards up, we could see that the structural beams were completely rotten away in the corner where they joined into the brick columns. The floorboards themselves had actually been all the structural support there was at the corners; with them removed, the porch was literally a seesaw, pivoting over the still-intact center piling. Well, OK, frankly this kind of thing is expected in a rebuild -- you have surprises as you tear down the old construction, and just hope that the surprises stop at some point. Fortunately they did stop, and replacing the entire structure turned out to be fairly cheap, just a couple hundred dollars of materials and a couple hours of labor.

Now things were rapidly approaching the finish line. The floorboards went in and were painted, and the railings were built. The previous porch had no railings at all, which made it somewhat unsafe and aesthetically ... odd. I have this thing about weak railings -- a railing should be able to support a LOT of horizontal load and not just be there for show. So I specified to the contractor how he was going to anchor the railing's support posts into the beams below, with the result being a railing that any number of people could lean on and that thing ain't goin' nowhere!