Old homes can be wonderful places to live. They are often full of character and charm, and built in ways that you don’t see with more modern homes. They can also come with many challenges. From walls and floors that aren’t square or level, to hidden issues that can cost lots of money. When owning an older home, you have to always be prepared to take the good with the bad.
Our home has certainly been no different. We love so many things about it but over the years we have uncovered some major problems as well. One of them happened in the past few months with our side porch. This discovery has lead to some unplanned home maintenance.
We used our side porch a bit when we first moved in. We didn’t yet have a deck or back porch of any kind so we kept our grill on the side porch so we’d cook out there but not much else. Like every other part of our house, it needed some work but it wasn’t too bad.
When we built the deck, we moved the grill and while I wouldn’t say we forgot about the side porch, we never thought to put it high on the list of projects that needed to be done.
A few months ago, I was outside retrieving a package that was left on the porch when I noticed a dark spot on the underside of the porch beam. I took a closer look at the odd dark spot and it was clear that it was a large rotten spot on the fascia board above one of the porch columns. I told B about it and quickly we discovered the issue ran much deeper, not to our surprise.
The more we opened up, the more problems we found but even though there is plenty to do before thinking about the “pretty stuff” we have decided to take this time to finally do what we’ve been talking about with the porch for many years.
While most of the structure of the porch needs to be repaired or replaced first, we’ll also be replacing the floor and ceiling, adding new light fixtures and a ceiling fan, moving the door from the living room to the kitchen and the closing in a portion of the back part of the porch with privacy screens to make a sort of outdoor living area.
To give you an idea of what the porch looked like before we started tearing it apart, I took a photo of a home not too far away from where we live. This porch is very similar in look and style to what ours looked like.
Our top railings were destroyed in Hurricane Sandy several years ago and we think that is a big reason why we had leaks that lead to the rotten areas.
Our hope is to finish the porch with many of the same details as was there originally to keep the integrity of the style of the home in place.
This project will likely last through the summer and well into the fall (if we even finish it this year) but I’m happy to know that at least it’s safe from falling down. I’ll be sharing B’s progress on rebuilding the porch as we go.
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