Porch Rebuild

One of the things my city does really well besides charging awesomely high taxes is encouraging neighborhood beautification projects. It is a program that works probably because it actually has nothing at all to do with city government. It is a grant opportunity offered to neighborhood on a block by block basis where if you get a certain number of people to participate, they will match any costs up to $1000. You really can't go wrong with this! So last year we took advantage of the Oswego Renaissance Grant and rebuilt our porch.

Here is how it went......

Before and After

After the old porch was removed, 6 x 6's were used for the main support columns.

Here it is before the really fun stuff happened!!

I used all pressure treated boards for the decking and skirting.

Same view before and after....

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Column Construction

So normally I work indoors doing finish carpentry and mouldings so working with pressure treated was a bit different. I know I wanted to have some good looking coulmns but didn't want them to separate and look like crap overtime as the wood dried out and shifted over time. Mainly what that meant for me was to make sure all my trim pieces fit super tight and I didn't have any mite angles on the pressure treated parts. The trim is all pvc moulding and wont change so I did have mitre joints on those. 

You can see the build up here. 

Now here they are with the PVC trim.

These were constructed basically the same way but using 6 x 6 anchors drilled into the concrete then the outer parts built up over that. 

Railing Construction

I really didn't want to add railings at all but since kids fall off things I guess I had to. So I thought a lot about what I wanted to do on design. I really liked the sawn baluster look but I wanted to make them myself and I wanted them to be strong and pressure treated. So heres what I came up with...

Yes it was a tedious job but Sebastian approved and I'm really happy with the results. The way I made the railings was to rip the deck boards into 1 1/2" strips then cut all the little triangle pieces one by one. I secured everything with adhesive and stainless steel brad nails for the small pieces and deck screws through the top of the 2 x 4's straight down into each vertical style for added strength. Then by putting the deck bard on the top as the hand rail it hid all the screws and looks super clean. The railings are constructed with a 2 x 4 top and bottom, and a 5/4 deck board as the top so it's nice and fat. Then there was some trim added to that. 

I will be painting it this summer!