Thursday, July 4, 2013

Front Porch Fest (go away rain!)

     Our plan for the long holiday weekend is to demo and rebuild the front porch roof, but it seems we are in the midst of a monsoon :( Over the last weekend, we took two layers of siding off the front porch area and decided that the porch roof needed to be redone sooner than later.

When we bought the house, there was a low ceiling in the porch, pictured above.


We knocked out that ceiling and found this (WHY do people cover up stuff like this?!). Steven and I actually did this back in December... not sure why I never shared.

     The junction between the porch section of the roof and the garage section of the roof was showing some water damage, and, as you can see, the beadboard and beams are in pretty rough shape. I don't really think this is the original porch roof since other houses in the neighborhood with the same plan as ours have end-gabled porch roofs and ours is hipped. It would make sense that the hipped roof was added whenever the garage was added, though I do not know when that was. However, our plan is to recreate the hipped framing (and beadboard!) exactly as you see above. We will also be replacing the screened-in look with square posts.
     You may be thinking, "Aren't you guys supposed to be working on the kitchen?!" The electricians are set to come do the kitchen/dining wiring next week, so there's not much for us to do until they finish. We will insulate the walls after the wiring is installed. Redoing the porch roof will be a big face lift for the front of the house, and it makes sense to get the demo/rebuild out of the way before putting in the new windows and front door in that area. I don't even want to think about some Clark Griswold moment happening right after a new window was installed... Not that anything like that would ever happen here ;)

3 comments:

  1. I think knocking it out and keeping it that way is a great idea as it gives it more room up there. And you can use a roofing material that can provide the needed protection without putting too much strain on the frames, and that would last longer than wooden ones.

    Kent @ Knox’s

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree with Kent. This can be a nice room addition, preferably a covered porch or sunroom. What do you think? Months have passed already, and I wish you're done with this project. Any updates, guys? :)

    Toby Almy @ TittleBrothers

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Toby, there have been a few porch posts since this one. We completely demo-ed the porch to start from scratch, and you can see the porch in its current state here: http://cloptonhouse.blogspot.com/2013/11/front-porch-update.html. At some point in the future, we'll dress up the columns and scoot those stairs over :)

      Delete