Dueling Ladders

I finished the 1/2 posts this weekend Here's a view post painting on Saturday:



As I was finishing these up, Jim went to Homer to pick up some hardi-plank/board-fake-wood stuff to cover the crappy porch soffits (no way we were going to strip thick paint while looking up - imagine neck aches, paint chips in the eyes, and no way to leverage the scraper...) Anyway, he comes back with the materials... and a new ladder! He was so excited about his new ladder, I had to capture it on camera. Warning, though - this is rated PG-13 for some gratuitous use of mild profanity... sorry Mom.



Just to put my reply in context, we've been using a little 6-foot wooden step ladder, left in the garage by the previous owner, for the past 4 1/2 years. Jim likes to say that it wobbles, but I contend that has more to do with the uneven ground than the actual ladder. Besides, if you follow ladder guidelines and don't step on the top two steps, it's all good.



So anyway, Jim used the new ladder to put up the cover-up soffits



And I used the old ladder to paint.



Luckily, both ladders do their job!

Then today we put the remaining railing and balusters up. It was not without problems. But I won't point them out, because we don't think anyone will actually notice them. Here's the pictures





A couple of side notes:
-The roofers are scheduled to start sometime this week.
-We turned on the pellet stove for the first time this season.

Thank Goodness for Columbus Day Weekend

I'm in a bit of a frantic panic to get stuff done today before I'm off to class, so only a brief description of what we did over the weekend....

I continued prepping and filling the 1/2 posts... they need time to cure, so I probably won't get to painting them until next weekend.

We also bought the beadboard for the porch ceiling. (note that the Homer guy was irritated at me asking him to cut the 16' boards, but was very pleasant when he came back over to help and Jim was present)

We painted those boards on Sunday,



and then on Monday, we were able to put them up. Looks pretty good too. We're getting better and better at doing the miter - a skill that will now be useless, since the floor and ceiling are now done.



It was very nice to have the lights up, as it got dark around 6:30, and we didn't finish until 8.

Well, "finish" is a slight overstatement - we have a very short final board 2" wide to fit on the front... and then there's also some moulding that needs to be put up. But at least now the trick-or-treaters can come to the house without (too much) fear.




Oh - and I significantly chopped down the rhododendron. Still there, just much smaller.

Back to Work

After a couple of weekends of not doing much for house renovations, this weekend we were back to the grindstone.

Most of Saturday I spent finishing the painting on the handrails & subrails - a deceptively time-consuming activity. I decided to paint them the dark green, so it took 3 coats.

Meanwhile, Jim did some electrical adjustments. The light we chose from Rejuvenation came in, so he put that up.



We also decided to put up 3 recessed lights



This really brightened the porch up - as you can see from this picture taken at dusk...



...which is particularly nice because for some reason, there is no street light that shines on our section of the street. And while this neighborhood is much safer than others I've lived in, it's still nice to be able to see what's happening when it's dark out.

Jim also moved the electrical box, which has been so beautifully displayed at the front door entrance (who chose that location????)


and moved it to a more inconspicuous location at the back of the porch - here is the hole that he drilled for the wires:



Much better location. Jim says it's for my Christmas lights and stuff. Which actually means that it's for my power tools and some family in the future's Christmas lights.

Then Sunday, we finally pulled back out THE BALULSTERS!!! We worked on two sections. I'll just go straight to the pictures, because that's all anyone wants to see!








The last two sections need parts of the 1/2 posts finished (they're in progress...) before they can be put up.

I can't believe how long it's taking to do this porch project. Last year it felt like we got soooo much more done. But it was all just straight clapboard stripping and painting. So much more detail on these, I guess.

I can't believe it, but we're already planning our "end of exterior renovation season" soup party...

Mocking up the Handrails

Most of Saturday was spent sanding and painting the beam. I'm not sure it looks like we did a lot, but it sure seemed to take a while.



We still need to fake some relief on the dark green brackets at the top of the posts, like I did on the bay window, but the paint needs to dry a little more before I do that...

There was some big community event geared at kids that took place on the common on Saturday. When these type of things happen, because we are right in downtown, our street becomes a parking lot, and we have a lot of extra traffic passing by. We had a lot of people saying they liked the color scheme (now that it looks like a color scheme and not just a pink house). Jim and I joked that we'll be starting a trend... only everyone else will have their houses done before we can even finish our porch...

Speaking of finishing,

I had visions of going all agro-renovator and getting the handrails put up this weekend too. THAT didn't quite happen, but we did get some parts cut out for two of the sections.

Here's Jim checking out how the subrail works. It took a couple tries to get a tight fit with the subrail between the posts. Not having any carpentry training, we kind of learn as we go - I'm sure there's plenty of tricks of the trade that we don't know...



And then I HAD to pull out the camera to take a shot of a baluster in place:



one day all 50+ of those things are going to see the light of day... one day... hopefully soon.

Then my little side project - the house number! I've been scouring the internet trying to find a cool house number to go on the porch. One fitting of the new improvements. I found a few sites that made cool metal ones in almost any font you can imagine. Those numbers were around 80 bucks. While maybe not a ton of money, I wasn't sure I wanted to spend that much for something that may or may not match the gold paint, and with some roof repairs/replacement pending (more on that another day), I didn't really want to spend the extra dollars anyway. So last night a lightbulb went off, and I decided to make one with the scroll saw and paint it with the same gold paint.

Here it is:


I do have to admit that the number broke in two at that thin spot on top. We had to glue it back together. Maybe it won't last through a New England winter - we'll find out - but, hey, the cost was essentially free, and that can't be beat.

And the Winner is...

OK, so maybe I influenced the poll with my exclamation point! next to my favorite, or maybe the majority of you just feel the same way I do... But still, even with a paint program, you're never really sure if it will look the same in real life.

Last weekend with Jim home we were able to do a bunch of post painting. Other than the tedious first day of sanding, none of the work was particularly difficult, so it all went pretty easy. Which almost makes me wonder if we worked hard enough? Particularly since it was my last weekend before fall semester started! Oh well.

Jim, by the way, has a much higher standard of finish work than I do. Which is probably a good thing. It comes from all the body work he has done on cars, I think. I don't really have the patience or technique, so he ended up doing most of the detail himself. They ended up looking pretty good.

And then we primed them:


To make all the painting easier, we drilled screws part-way into both ends of the posts and then set them onto notches cut into the sawhorses. That way we could twirl them around fairly freely.

Then to dry the posts, we put more notches into some 2xwhatevers and left them in the garage overnight:


Then on Sunday and Monday we worked on the painting in this garage set-up. It probably would have been more comfortable had it been higher up, but oh well, what's a little back pain?




I thought this was going to be a masking tape nightmare of a project (that's one way to support Mother 3M), but actually, the more that I worked on it, the easier it got, and I really only needed it for the gold section where it went from square post to turned post. Most of the pinstriping was done without tape - a benefit of the turnable setup.

I really like how the gold turned out:


And overall, I think the posts look great!


This is where we ended on Monday afternoon. We cleaned up and called some friends over for a little Labor Day BBQ.

To finish these off, I need to get some semi-gloss pink paint. The flat paint looks a little odd with all the others all glossy.

Then it's make the base plates, picture-frame the porch floor with an edge piece, and install the posts, etc etc etc. A lot to do still, but it's starting to feel good to see it all coming back together.

Paint My Posts

OK, so I'm getting more and more dangerous with the computer painting (though still not any better). I've got to pick out a color scheme for the posts, as hopefully in the next few weekends, if all goes well, I should be able to start painting.

Starting with a shopped-up photo from before (no, I haven't finished painting the front or putting up the shingles yet... and by the way, the balusters are only computer added as well - hey, it makes it seem a little more like the final product!) Here are my proposals for the post colors... starting with the most basic

All Cream:


Green & Gold:


Green & Pink:


Green, Pink, & Gold!


And just to see it all...


What do you think? If I've done this right, there should be a poll on the right hand side...

Does Anyone Know an Easier Way???

Sanding down the flat sections of the porch posts is fairly easy - I just use the orbital sander. The large convex sections are not even that bad - I can use the sander on those too. And the abrasive string works pretty well on the tight grooves...



But the small and medium convex areas and those 3 concave sections... I'm having trouble figuring out an effective way to smooth them out! I've been using one of these sanding sponges:



and I'm not so pleased with how it's working. Maybe I just have no patience. Maybe I'm worrying too much about something that people will never even notice. Or maybe I just don't have the right tool. And maybe someone out there knows a better way?

Maybe I'll save the hard parts for Jim to do when he comes home this week... hmmm...

Filling & Faking

My day unexpectedly freed up today, so I put the filler on the porch posts.



This filler epoxy was smelly. But it definitely had a longer pot life than the bondo type filler. This goes into the list of "tedious" jobs. I'm not sure I have the skilled hand to recreate some of the lost profile - at least not well. But I have a feeling it's one of those things that people won't even notice unless they're investigating close up.

And what would my weekend be without at least one tangential project?
The other thing I played with today after I finished filling, was the brackets on the bay window. If you've been reading this, you may recall my earlier post obsessing over the colors around the window. Well, the brackets have continued to bug me, so I finally got some new light green paint and did a test. Here's what it looks like close up:



My attempt was to fake some relief and to make it so that the brackets didn't just look like bland and awkward additions. I think it worked pretty well. It got too dark, so I wasn't able to finish all of them tonight... just gives me something else to work on tomorrow.

Hard as Wood

Aside from the little front door glass mishap, I've been making some pretty good progress on the porch. Jim is off on his Speed Week adventure, so I've been on my own.

Last night I worked on the porch posts. If you recall, they had some pretty nasty rot on the bottom. I chopped off the bottom 1 1/2 inches to reveal, for the most part, fairly good wood. Here's the chopped off bits:



Niiiiiice. The sawing process was a bit of a fiasco, if you can imagine me trying to maneuver 93.5" 6x6 beams around in my basement by myself. (the basement, by the way, is more of what I'd call a "cellar" and is obstructed by chimneys, structural posts, and pipes and overcrowded with woodworking equipment and clothes washer spare parts) The first post I cut was not such a good job, but as with most things in this renovation project, the more I did it, the better I got at it.

Then today, I went at them with the Clear Penetrating Epoxy Sealer, or CPES from the Rot Doctor. This stuff is supposed to "restore strength to rotten wood while helping to resist further rot in the remaining good wood"

I've brushed that epoxy mix on...



And now I wait 1 - 3 days until I apply the epoxy filler, which I probably won't get to until Sunday.

I've also been working on the balusters. I had started out priming some with aerosol cans of primer. That didn't go very far - I think I got 18 done with 4 cans. So when I went to Homer to get more, I decided to just buy a paint sprayer. Nothing too fancy, but with the amount of woodwork that needs to be done on this porch, it will easily pay for itself versus the ridiculous amount of aerosol cans I'd need at $5 each. And I can use it for priming AND top coats.

While my set up wasn't the best, once I got used to it, the sprayer worked pretty well. And I finished priming all the remaining balusters in good time:





And, lastly (though I actually did this first), I trimmed up the deck boards. They're not trimmed to their final length, but I wanted to be able get on and off the porch without weird contortions or worrying about stepping on unsupported, poorly cantilevered boards. Plus, I think the mailman and the UPS guy are thanking me for it...

More Porch Floor Continued

Last night we continued laying the porch floor from the miter to the back. We had a pretty good method going. We prelaid the boards, marked a line for the screw location, and then put hash marks where each screw was to be drilled. Then I would place the individual boards with the nail spacers, and Jim would screw them in. And so on, in assembly line fashion.

It was working well last night, except for the pesky mosquitos. My blood must be like candy to them because I could not keep them away! I ran over the the mini-mart to see if they had any repellant, but unfortunately for me, they had just run out. So I spent my cash on Swedish Fish and diet root beer instead and returned back to the house. (drat that mini-mart!)

Then I remembered that I had a citronella candle in the garage. So we pulled that and a tiki torch out - left over from when we used to have barbeques... While not a perfect solution, I have to say that it did thin out most of the swarms.




And here Jim is, screwing in the last screw of the field boards:


And Taya, with stomach staples freshly removed, supervised all evening from the front door:


Here is the deck, just before we retired for the evening - to eat our 9:30 dinner and watch the Olympics before we fell asleep:

(notice the Swedish Fish and diet root beer placed conspicuously on the porch floor)

Once again, we were kind to our neighbors and refrained from running the saw to trim off the excess boards.

And here it is, in the light of this morning's sun:


It's almost like you can start to see the beginnings of a good porch - a wicked good porch. You might have to squint really hard and use your imagination, but it's there...