One of my favorite features of the house is the front porch. I love how big it is and the shape of it, and I love the posts and spindles. I love that there are already hooks in the ceiling waiting for us to hang a porch swing. But those beautiful posts were rotting as a result of some previous leaking from the old roof. Which meant we needed to replace all the posts and railings.
Do you have any idea what the cost of lumber is these days? It’s crazy expensive. And for specialty pieces, like porch posts to match our Queen Anne architecture, it’s also a really long wait.
If you thought I was upset about the chimneys, I had an absolute meltdown about replacing our beautiful wooden porch posts with vinyl. In fact, I have never felt so high-maintenance in all my life as when I was fighting to get the right posts. They had to have curves, a hint of an hourglass figure, otherwise they just looked too modern.
Fun fact, since the porch posts support the entire weight of the roof for the front of the house, it’s not trivial to change them out – especially when part of the roof and main header is completely rotten.
The process began by removing the parts of the porch ceiling, molding, and header that were completely rotten and had to be replaced. I will confess, it was very cool looking up into the porch’s attic space and seeing that sometime over the last 100 years it had been closed in. We knew from the attic that the porch’s space was not accessible and had wondered what was there. Standing on the porch, we could look up and see the original wood siding continuing all the way to the roof joists. For a brief moment, Trey considered opening the entire porch roof up, but because the bottom of the roof was unfinished and there would be tremendous effort, we decided to leave the height of the porch as-is.
Once the rotten parts of the header were replaced and all the casing was closed up, the team moved on to removing the porch rails – leaving the posts in place. Once the rails were cleared, temporary posts were built in the gaps. Surprisingly (note the sarcasm), the porch line wasn’t level any longer from years of settling and damaged shingles. While inserting the temporary posts, the team began the process of jacking the roofline to a more-level position and removing the old posts.
Once the new vinyl porch posts finally arrived, the crew began installing the mounting hardware and measuring how much further the roof needed to raise. For the record, there’s nothing quite as nerve wracking as hearing the house groan, creak, and pop as the front of the porch roofline is jacked up an additional 3 inches. Each crew member (and Trey) grabbed a post and got it into position quickly once the roof was high enough. Every person’s job was to keep the post sitting on its foot-piece and aligned with the top mounting bracket as the two jacks were slowly lowered down. As the roof came to settle on the new posts, there was an audible sigh of relief – from the crew and the house!
Once the posts were in, things flew to the finish line getting the rails installed, until…
It turns out, the supply house that the rails were purchased from had accidentally mixed some batches of railing and mounting brackets. We were short a few brackets. So here our nearly complete front porch sat for two more weeks waiting on the parts to ship from less than 100 miles away. Finally, the parts arrived and the guys came to wrap it up!
After the porch rails were finished, Trey was able to install new carriage lights by the front door to go with the classic aesthetic we want to maintain in the house. Finally, the porch was done! Except, we were missing one thing. Remember those porch swing hooks I mentioned? They were still empty. I thought it would be Spring before we got to hang anything from them, but Trey surprised me at Christmas and bought me a classic white porch swing.
We weren’t able to hang the swing right away because we were storing the wood for the master bedroom floor on the front porch, but that’s a story for another day.
