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.