The Late Summer Project.

Several years ago, right after buying this place, I had to rebuild the front porch and balcony because it was collapsing. So I reused some old porch flooring that we salvaged and got the edges painted but never got around to sealing the wood properly. It looked pretty good at the time but ten years later some of the boards were warped or rotting out so it was time to address the porch properly.

Here are some rotten boards on the edge of the deck and below you can see that I had to remove a section of the ceiling because it had rotted out.

This became my late summer project. I wanted to get the lower porch restored before Halloween. I bought pressure treated tongue and groove porch floor boards and a piece of pressure treated plywood to replace the ceiling section that I removed. Also bought a combination of pressure treated lumber and cedar boards to do some extra trimming. I also had to get the heat gun out to strip the layers of paint from the ceiling.

The flooring started to be replaced after stripping all the paint. You can see that below.

Then the plywood got cut and some cedar boards were used to fix the ceiling.

 Posts and rails were painted and then installed after the porch floor was painted.

Now it looks like this. Still some major painting to do but the upper level is ready to fix in the spring time. I just bought a ceiling fan for that upper level as well. It has only been waiting 12 years to have one installed!

Now while all this was going on I got sidetracked a little and started to strip the wood around the main door. to the right of the porch. In 2010, after tearing the porch off of that side of the house it looked like this.

A friend of mine gave me a bunch of old trim years ago that was taking up space in my basement. I decided to use two sections of it to put above the door. You can see by the beige paint that originally there was something there. After a little bit of painting, the front door currently looks like this.

With being mayor and all, this process took about 8 weeks. So, now I am free from those chains it looks like I will be busy this year getting a lot more work done on the house!