Two weekends ago our front porch was “jacked up” in the most literal sense: both in its bad sinking on one corner, and the jacks we used to support it when work was started to fix it.
To bring y’all up to speed, when we bought our home we could see that the one corner of the porch was sunken. We had planned on starting work repairing the front porch next summer. But recently we’d noticed it was getting worse so we inspected it again and found that the pillar was crumbling.
I use the term “crumbling” to the fullest degree because when Karl and his Dad teamed up for the day and started working on it, they were able to take the footing apart without even using a chisel; all it took was their bare hands. Yike-o-roma.
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To properly do our porch, we have to fix the mortar in our foundation’s stone under the porch and get proper footings put deep below-ground, but with Winter approaching we’re going to have to wait another few months to do these projects.
However, because of the bad condition and immediate need to keep the porch from collapsing, we’re using a temporary solution.
So, Karl and his Dad used adjustable floor jacks to support the porch, then removed the ugly chicken-wire porch skirt and the crumbling footing.
As you can see in the pic below, instead of deep footers, after clearing out the old footing Karl and his Dad laid some quick drying cement to build up the old footing still in the ground.
Next they replaced the areas where the beams had rotted (boy were they rotted!) with a reciprocating saw to clear out the old beam, then move the new beam in.
Cement blocks were laid in place of the old footing.
When we do get to go back to work on the porch, besides the stone foundation’s repair and the porch footings, we’ll need to replace some of the tongue-and-groove floorboards and sand and paint the flooring…
…and restore the rails and columns by scraping/sanding/stripping, using wood epoxy on the rotted areas, and finally paint them.
Woo-boy.
It’s going to be a LONG and time consuming project.
But at least now we don’t have to worry about the porch collapsing!
…Now for the fun stuff! We have to figure out what kind of porch skirting we want (because chicken wire ain’t ever happening).
Here’s some ideas I’m tossing around:
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| arches |
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| tsk tsk – skirting doesn’t line-up with the columns |
Any stand out to y’all? I’m wanting to stay away from the typical diamond wall lattice if I can as it’s too common looking to me unless done with a bit of flair like the blue lattice above. The square lattice is easy to find and not as typically used, and keeps with the straight lines of our Foursquare….or do we try something fun, fancy…and way more punishingly difficult…like in the last picture?
Comment below! I want to hear input! :)
p.s. – a great resource for the proper way to install skirting and historically what was used for skirt designs can be found at Old House Guy.
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