It seems like whenever I start a project like this, I have very few opinions about certain elements, and then I end up with very strong opinions. Some parts, I know from the beginning how I want them to turn out, while other parts only get my focus when there’s no other choice. The lighting for the front porch was definitely one of the latter types. There was an existing flush-mount fixture on the front porch which I had only noticed when I had to take it down and put up the Moravian star at Christmastime. I’d sort of assumed I would just put it back up once I got the ceiling done, but the more I looked at it, the less I liked it. I had some idea that I might find another fixture that matched the outdoor post lamp at the top of my stairs, but after searching through hundreds of options online, I still hadn’t found anything I liked. So then I started thinking about other styles entirely.

I’ve always loved the lights at Christmastime – the little white decorative string lights that so many people put on their houses are gorgeous, to me – they’re fun and casual and festive, and they’re great. What if I could do something like that, but have them year-round? I quickly realized that the tiny string lights are mostly not meant for permanent use, but there is an alternative – the kind of string lights restaurants use around their patios or other outdoor spaces. Bigger bulbs, but keeping the casual, fun vibe. So I found a heavy-duty set of string lights, 48 ft long, and got LED Edison-bulb style lamps for it. At first I was thinking I’d just run them around the perimeter of the porch, but then realized that they’d have to start in the middle since that’s where the fixture attaches, so I should create a criss-cross pattern instead. So with 15 small cup hooks, I put up a symmetrical crossing pattern of lights that illuminates my porch perfectly, and even leaves me with an end to attach the Moravian star to when Christmas comes around.

Now that the new boards were all in, it was time to scrape the old boards of all their loose paint and then paint the entire ceiling. Scraping shipping paint off of tongue-and-groove over my head turned out to be a process I had very little patience for, so after a very cursory process involving several hours on consecutive evenings, I decided to embrace the bumpiness of old paint as adding character, and went ahead and primed the whole surface. Painting ceilings isn’t that terrible, as long as you have an extension handle for your roller, and a comfortable brush for getting into all of the grooves. My ceiling took three coats – one of primer, and two of exterior paint. I’d originally planned to paint it a light blue, but the paint I was going to use (leftover from the front door) had gone bad, and I realized I wasn’t particularly interested in drawing attention to my porch ceiling, so simple white actually made more sense.

This is the first project I’ve had that’s made enough trash to need a trip to the dump. My kitchen demolition was bigger, of course, but my contractor dealt with all the debris from that, to my great relief. For the porch, I’d just made a pile of junk – the four old posts, all the vinyl from the ceiling and surround, and all the railings, plus the pieces of ceiling I took out. It was a pretty impressive pile, and it couldn’t stay on my porch forever. My city gives you two free dump trips as a resident, so I applied for the pass and planned to head out early on Saturday to get rid of the junk.

I borrowed my mom’s car (again – thanks mom!), and loaded it up. Loading it took almost an hour – some of the pieces were pretty heavy, and it took some careful stacking to get it all in. Drove (carefully) out to the landfill, which is about 20 minutes from my house, got to go through the “cars and SUVs” line, bypassing the much longer “trucks and trailers” line, then with a little assistance from the guys directing traffic, backed the car up to a metal ledge leading to very large dumpster. It only took about 10 minutes to unload the car, with a few moments of glee as I shoved a 50-pound chunk of railing over the edge to land with a resounding thump. Once the car was empty, I returned it to my parents’ house and headed home to enjoy my newly clear porch – or rather, to install the rest of my porch ceiling, now without the massive tripping hazard I’d previously been working around.

This part is the story of how I did this repair badly and then went back and did it right. My initial plan was to just cut off the boards that were rotted and replace them with new boards.

The flaw in this plan is that tongue and groove is typically installed so that no two boards end at the same place, so having a section of boards all the same length was really conspicuous.

The other flaw in this plan is that modern tongue and groove is not the same width nor thickness as the tongue and groove that was installed on my porch in 1953 when they built the house. So not only did the boards look odd because they all ended at one spot, they also had some awkward gaps to try to make up the difference in width.

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This project should take: a bit of wood filler, a good outdoor primer and outdoor paint, a small brush for all the corners, and maybe a roller if there are enough flat surfaces to warrant it. For me, this project has taken: a large amount of brute force, a crowbar, a post jack, borrowing a bigger car, use of my dad’s table saw, my router… okay, let me back up. On one of the first lovely weekends this spring, I decided to tackle repairing and repainting my front porch posts and railing. One of the posts had seemed a little loose last fall when I was grinding the floor around it, so along with my paint supplies, I gathered some bits of wood to shim it up and got started. An important detail – my porch posts are wrapped in aluminum sheathing, and the ceiling and upper surfaces of the porch are covered in vinyl siding. So my first attempt was just to shove a shim under the edge of the wobbly post. This didn’t work very well – it was hard to get the shim under the aluminum edge, but once it was under, it seemed to do nothing at all. So I went to get the crowbar and pry the aluminum off of the post so I could see what was happening. And when I did that, I found a crumbly mess.

Yes, the post was rotted. Not holding up any weight whatsoever. Not something I can fix with a shim. Time to learn how to replace a porch post, it seems! I also went ahead and peeled the covering off the other posts, and discovered that three out of the four were rotting. So now the project had become replacing all four porch posts. Once I started peeling aluminum off, though, I kept going, taking down the entire porch ceiling as well. And there I discovered that the ceiling underneath was tongue and groove – with some peeling paint, but a pretty nice ceiling… except for the part near the door, where there had obviously been a roof leak, and the ceiling had rotted. Awesome. So forget the quick repainting job, it’s now time to rebuild the porch! This includes replacing all the porch posts, railings, part of the ceiling, and I still need to paint the floor eventually too. Continue reading →

Way back in August 2013 I wrote “Ignore the peeling paint on the porch floor, that’s a project for another day…” at the end of a post about repainting my front door. That was indeed a project for another day… about a year later. So, fall 2014, I started scraping the paint off of my front porch floor. The porch itself is concrete, but had been painted (I think) red originally, and then gray after that. Both those layers of paint were peeling, though, because once a little concrete is exposed, water can get behind the paint, and then the whole thing peels.

I started by taking a paint scraper to it, and discovered very quickly that while I could get some large chunks of paint up, other bits were stuck very firmly and weren’t going anywhere.

Time for power tools! I tried my palm sander first, with some very rough sandpaper. That was… not effective, pretty much at all. Continue reading →