Front Porch

Our front porch used to be rotting wood that was also painted blue (it matched the trim color of the house at the time but that has since been repainted a cream). This would be a time I would show you a picture but my pictures haven't been working lately. Anyway, it was really ugly and needed to be replaced so David and I went to Menard's a couple weeks ago and got the boards and screws for the new stuff. We had started prying up a few boards (12 I believe) before we realized that we didn't have the equipment to jack up the roof so we could put boards under the pillars (again, easier to describe with a picture but hopefully you know what I mean). We also had to put sand under the porch, sloping away from the house to keep water from going in the basement. (You can use dirt but we have lots of sand from digging out our basement). This kind of slowed our project down because we need hundreds of buckets of sand that we would have to carry out of the basement, around the house, and into this porch hole. So it sat unfinished for a few weeks. David's parents weren't originally going to redo the porch so it was sort of our project.

Well, today we had David's parents, little sister, two cousins, and grandparents come out to help us on the house and they made it their personal mission to help us with the porch. There was an assembly line for sand, someone spreading it out underneath the porch, and two people prying up the rest of the boards, jacking up the porch roof, and putting new boards in place (not screwed in, just in place). After about 6 hours of work, the porch is still not finished. The sand is still not finished either. We have to exchange some of our boards because of bad knots, chunks seemingly cut out, etc that don't make them pretty. The sand is more than halfway done but I would estimate will stay take at least 50 more buckets (by the way, when I say buckets, I mean 5 gallon pails. The kids were carrying ice cream buckets or the pails only half full since the sand gets heavy but we still need a lot.) Also, our boards are 8 feet long (because that's how they're sold) and we only need 7 feet so we'll also have to cut them off when we screw them in.

After our front porch is done, we'll have to redo the stairs. But we can't redo the stairs until we raise the sidewalk leading to them. We are going to do that when we have the cement here to do the apron at the end of our driveway. So really lots of projects depend on other projects and it kind of seems like you have a lot to get done in one day.

I'm thankful for all the work we had today and that our porch is getting somewhere. I do admit I'm a little sad that David and I's project got taken over but otherwise who knows when we would've finished.