Porches

For many people, the porch is an integral part of the character of a house. Whether its just a little awning over a stoop or the wrap-around porch of a manor house, the homes just wouldn't be the same without them. Unfortunately, porches take a great deal of abuse from the weather, especially moisture. Decking and framing rot is a common problem on many of our clients porches. Rot takes place in wood that gets wet and stays wet, allowing the normal already present microbes to decompose the wood in the same was that it would decompose on the forest floor. Make no mistake, wood is designed to rot, and rot quickly under the right circumstances. On another occasion, we'll discuss the reasons we use wood as a building material (rather than steel or stone) despite its tendency to rot.

But for now, we'll deal with the problem of rotting wooden porches. Because a porch is always outside, it is exposed to a great deal of moisture, which is not in an of itself a problem. What creates a problem is when the wood is continually moist or wet and doesn't have a chance to dry out. This condition mimics the conditions of a tree on the forest floor--giving microbes the chance to begin digesting the wood and you get rot. To mitigate this, you've got two options: try to keep the wood dry or use wood that will not rot (Pressure Treated wood). In the project below, we had to use both methods. The client wanted to maintain the original shape of the porch as well as restore the turned cedar posts. Much of the framing was rotten. A fair amount had to be replaced and all of the decking needed to be replaced.

You can see in the above picture that we've replaced some of the framing with pressure treated 4x6's and 2x6's. The intact framing, which happened to be Hemlock, we covered with a bituthene product called Grace Deck Protector. This puts a waterproof membrane between the decking and the framing, theoretically preventing the water from sticking around long enough for rot to occur.


Many homes in Maine have a bulkhead door to the cellar, but this home had the cellar access built right into the porch as you can see above. We were able to recreate the existing door built right into the porch decking. When the door is closed you can only see the tops of the hinges sticking up.

Another challenging aspect of this restoration was the deterioration of the existing cedar post feet. Instead of replacing the whole post with a newer, pressure treated post, the client wanted to keep them and use a scarf joint to replace just the rotten part. So we cut the posts 24 inches above the decking and used tongue and fork scarf joints to add new pressure treated post feet. We secured the joints with 4 3/4" oak pegs and two beefy screws (and bunged the holes with the same pegs). After priming, the new foot is still visible, but certainly not an eyesore. To prevent future deterioration, we installed a boot of lead flashing around the bottom four inches of the each post.

When it was all finished, it looked like this photo above.

Another recent porch restoration is pictured below. This one involved some new framing, new roof sheathing, new roofing and new siding above the porch roof.


When the project is finished, most of the ginger bread house trim will be restored to its original glory.