Front Porch Work ca 1995

Since Blogger was acting up yesterday and I couldn't post pictures I'll do another post today. Just catching up on some old projects that were completed a few years ago. This one is the front porch floor. First, a beautiful before we bought the house picture:

You can't see it, but there is a lovely plywood and plastic grass front porch, accented by wrought iron, a bare bulb fixture, and an aluminum screen door. With the two--possibly three--air conditioners hanging out the windows and the artistic fence, a veritable Ghetto Palace.

Here's another shot showing the condition of the faux structural beams and the ceiling.



I had to take them all down and reconsolidate the wood and rebuild some of them, as water had turned them into veritable shells. I love Abatron! That stuff is wonderful. I still haven't put a few of them back up, though.


That's tongue and groove cedar, and you can't see it very well, but we ran a bead on the edge of each piece with a router, just like the original.

For a while I thought that I might have to put in a carriage step because the old carriage drive went along this side of the house, but didn't have any pictures to prove it, so didn't. It would have been a nice touch, though.

We bull-nosed the edges of the boards. Why can't I find a router bit that makes a 1/2" roundover?

Of course, we built new stairs and rounded over the edges and split the treads down the middle for water runoff, but I don't have any pictures of the finished product. I just hate what the FO did with the piers on each side of the steps! There are granite footings for each of these with ROUNDED fronts. That means that the bricks these were originally made of had rounded edges. That will be a big problem when I get around to re-doing those. The corner of the house to the right of the steps has a rounded edge also, just like the left side of the front arch, above. It's a nice touch. The owner/builder was a brick mason originally. When I dug into the pile of crap under the porch I had hoped to find these bricks. No such luck. A few have turned up in the driveway, but I have no idea where the rest of them went. I also don't know what capped the top of these piers. Shaped granite? And why would anyone throw these away? They have not been found anywhere I have dug on the property.

Finally, here is a pic of the 20's light fixture we hung before we removed the aluminum door and stripped the oak front door, and the house number plaque we bought.

I know, it still looks ghetto with all that painted brick.