Front Porch Work

Well I've finally gotten back to work on the house. It feels really good to be accomplishing things on the house again. It's been almost 6 months now... I took the entire week off last week so I could get the front porch done.

I was so excited about getting back to work again that I forgot to take pictures the first few days.

I started by clearing out the screen porch area, it had become a holding space for new antiques in need of restoration. Then I began installing the 2x4 framing that the screen will attach to. While I was doing this I had some help that was scraping old paint and primering on the rest of the porch.

There was an area of the framing on the screen porch that was missing. It was made this way but I still cant figure out why. Anyways I built the sill just like the rest of it. Here is a pic of it (sorry, no before pic).

I will fill the seams in with bondo and sand it smooth.

I found a nice set of wood screen doors at Home Depot for $20 each! I had to widen the doorway by 6" and cut down the doors by about 4" for them to fit. I used a dowel jig to reattach the top part of the door.

In the above picture they are just sitting in place. I took out the fiberglass screen and will be using aluminum screen in it's place.

Next I got back to stripping the columns. The last time I worked on the columns was last year, you can see those posts here, and here.

The double column at the right side of the stairs had a lot of rot at the bottom. Unfortunately there was no saving the bottom section. The wood used in the columns is 1" and 1 1/4" thick so I bought 2x6's and 2x8's and ripped them down to the correct thickness. Here is the rebuilt bottom section, as I mentioned before I didnt get pictures for the first few days so I dont have a before picture of the column base.

Then I installed the top part of the column and primered it. The capital of the column was also rotted. The way it's built it has a large block of wood in the center and the decorative trim is attached to it. The large block of wood is what was rotted. I used an old sill beam to get the correct size piece of wood I needed, 3 1/2"x6 3/4"x18". I ripped it to size then attached the trim to it.

Then I installed the column.

The capital is built wrong so I'm going to need to take it back down and rebuild it.


Another capital had a lot of rot so I had to rebuild it as well. This one is not near as complex as the double one.

As you can see from the picture above there are only two original pieces on this one. I ripped the block of wood to size then cut out the decorative trim by tracing an original piece from another capital on to a 1x6, then cutting it out with a jig saw. I used wood hardener on the original piece that had some rot.


Next I finished rebuilding the soffets and facia on the porch roof. Here is a before picture of one of the areas.

And here is after installing the soffet and facia.

The spray foam is a small area of rot that I couldnt cut out. I filled it with the spray foam then I'm going to cut it down and cover it with bondo then sand it smooth. I still need to install the facia trim in two areas that you can see missing in the pic.

In the before picture above you can see that the ceiling was missing from the front part of the porch. That was the next thing that I installed.

With all the columns finally installed I began painting them.

I finished four columns before it got dark on me. I will finish painting the rest of the columns this afternoon then finish painting the screen porch area so I can install the screen.