Huh? Ripping up the Porch Floor?

Sorry, my adoring readers, for not checking in for a couple of days. There has not been time for blogging: the deadline of Anne and the children's return has been a nervous litany in the backs of our minds. "12:30 p.m. Sunday. Gotta get done by 12:30 Sunday. It will all be too late on Sunday," muttered into our respirators in the misty overcast of morning, the unforgiving sun of midday, the dusty breezes of evening, and in the mosquito-ridden dark after sunset. (Yes, mosquitoes! In Portland! What hast thou wrought, O climate change?) We've been working hard. (And last night Ray came over for beers and grown-up games on the Wii, so there wasn't time for blogging then, either.)

Read this post as if it were written last Tuesday, when it would have been were I not out late at erudite book readings and fine dining (that is, a "demodern post-constructionist metafictional novel" and half a tuna sandwich and beer at McMenamins).

The under-porch storage project is independent of the porch-floor replacement, except that we're working in that part of the house anyway, and we need to put flooring/roof over the steps down into the new cellar. The porch floor has needed replacement since they purchased the house. Due to years of no maintenance and bad gutters (replaced a few years ago by Andrew), standing water near the steps had rotted out the wood. (Here's a little known fact: the porch was carpeted in Astroturf when they moved in.)

Not quite half the porch needs replacement, just the part at the head of the concrete steps. Simple enough to do -- pull off the old boards, slide in the new ones, prime, and paint. We figured it would take a day, maybe two when including unexpected surprises. Ha ha.

The first challenge was to find replacement lumber. The boards on the porch, presumably from 1915, but maybe from 1957 when the house was remodeled, are 3" tongue-and-groove boards long enough to extend from door to step without seams (about 7'). We needed about 40 new boards. Rejuvenation House sells them for $1.86 a linear foot -- or over $500. Ugh. Home Depot sells a cheaper version -- about 3-1/2" wide (which we could accommodate, though they wouldn't match the other, older part of the porch). However, the Home Depot lumber is about 1/4" - 1/2" thinner than the original lumber. The thinner board works with modern construction techniques, where the supporting struts are no more than 18" apart, but this older building has them about 24" or more apart. The Home Depot porch boards would sag pretty quickly, and be more liable to break.

Then, on Tuesday, we were at Woodcrafters, a specialty store for working with hardwood. If you ever want to get a Ph.D. in whittling, this is the store to visit. Anyway, they carry kiln-dried wood of the size we needed, for $1.60 a linear foot -- cheaper than Rejuvenation House but not "cheap". They had only a couple of boards in stock, so we'd have to order more (missing that Sunday deadline). Also, theirs came in 12' boards, giving us the option of wasting a lot (we only needed about 7' a board) or being forced to make a patchwork floor -- requiring a lot more work in cutting, placement and "wood filling" the seams.

We decided to look for other possibilities, such as plain 3" boards along which Andrew could rout out the tongue-and-groove. (Whether that is less work than building a patchwork porch floor remains to be determined, but it would at least have been cheaper). But as we walked through the high-ceilinged aisles of precut lengths of Rosewood, Poplar, Cherry and Cedar, of moldings in Oak, Maple, Walnut and Hemlock, of raw lengths of Exotic Woods (teak from Congo, catalpa, wood I've never heard of, like bubinga) ... suddenly the clouds parted and light shone down in haloed rays, as the demonstration table-saw sang across the store like a thousand shrill voices : we came upon an unmarked palette, there at the back of the store, of literally a porch-worth of our desired 3" tongue-and-groove fir.

It turns out, a client had ordered a special-cut load, and then backed out of the deal. The contractor wanted to get the wood off his hands asap, so it was selling for a mere $1 a linear foot, on a first-come, first-serve basis. It was 5:30 and they close at 6:00, so decisions had to be made.

Problem is, the special cut boards were 7' long, with a handful of 9' lengths. But our 7' was a rough estimate -- we had measured the space, but were expecting to have to cut it when we got home, so hadn't been exact about how much we needed where. We raced home and measured the porch again. How many boards did we really need? Would 7' work or were we back to square one? Would we pay $1 a linear foot in any case and just patch?

We measured -- we needed 7'3" lengths. Thirty-five of them. The clock was ticking -- I had to battle traffic to get to the suburb where Jasper Fforde was speaking, and Andrew wanted to get back and buy the wood, if it was usable, before the store closed. And, after all, Anne and the children were due back in only 4 days.

Okay, we reasoned, we'll just replace the header board (a 2x8, visible in the photos up top) with a 2x11, gaining those three inches in a deeper threshold at the top of the stairs. This would have the added benefit of placing that seam (between end of tongue-and-groove and side of header board) a couple of inches further away from rain splashing off the steps. It would require adding a 4x4 in the structural struts (to nail the ends of the boards to) but that would be a relatively trivial thing to add and we already had the extra wood (we checked). In Portland speak, "No worries. No worries".

I dashed off in one direction for my erudite evening, and Andrew in another direction to buy lumber. He bought 36 boards, (sold in packs of 6), including all of the 9' (one pack), just in case. And we were set to go on the porch.