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 →