Quaint front Porch

Yes. Our quaint front porch where we had (and will have again) bench to sit on to watch the tourist horse and carriages go clop clop clop down our street.

I say “had” because for the past several months, our front porch has been undergoing extensive renovations by our one-man team carpenter (an expert in historic houses, and also the man who fixed the wood windows in our living room, den and spare bedroom, and who we hope will fix or replace the remaining windows in the house). We aren’t just having the porch repaired. We are also having the siding on the house repaired as well, but the porch has been taking the longest. There were structural issues in the basement (the porch is over “living space” down there), and a lot of the great siding was rotted.

Anyway, I am going to post some pictures here of the before and “not quite after”.

So, one of the problems with the porch was the lack of eaves, which we now have.

In addition, the drainage was crappy, so hopefully now we have resolved that issue as well.  No more drain dripping down the side of the porch (yes – the drain was cut through the side and water just dripped down the side of the porch…).  Just a properly sloping floor!

You’ll also notice that there were windows in the porch. Those were NOT original, and were installed poorly and causing all kinds of trouble. We decided to take them out as it would be much easier, and cheaper, to NOT put in new windows. And it also takes the porch back to its original state.

I am realizing now that while I took a lot of pictures of the outside of the porch, I did not take any before pictures of the sitting area. But here are some pictures. You can kind of see above  the grey-painted plywood which was the before, and then the red wood which was more original (wish they hadn’t covered it!), and now the original floor is gone (it was in really bad shape), new plywood is down, and we are waiting to order vinyl to protect the floor from the elements.

And, someday when it’s all done, I will definitely post the final pictures.  This year when it’s done, it will be primed, but not painted.  And then next year (I hope I hope I hope) the whole house will be painted and look fantastic!