Measure Thrice, Cut Once -- and still cut wrong

My last post was about Tuesday night, and the decision about the lumber for the porch.

On Wednesday, Andrew Hung a Door (check my earlier post -- I can't figure out how to link to my own posts yet).

On Thursday we didn't get much done (ibid.).

On Friday night, in the mosquito-biting dark I mentioned before, we encountered our first major setback.

During the day, we had prepped for the porch floor installation -- pulling off the old wood (not as easy as we expected); removing gazillions of long rusty nails; adding Rotten Wood Repair Filler to the supporting aged 2x6s; leveling the floor of the crawl space (because without a porch floor we could stand, so it was a lot easier to rake than after the floor/roof is installed); laying a tarp over the space to discourage its continued use as Neighborhood Preferred Litter Box, etc.

(I made Andrew take a photo of me pulling nails to prove that I really do some of the work, not just take photos and comment upon his work.)

So, the next thing was to add another strut for the ends of the tongue-and-groove boards to attach to. (Mel is, in fact, screwing the bolts into that very support strut in the picture.) And then (if you recall) we were planning to replace the current 2x8 board -- the "threshold" -- that lays across the top of the steps with a 2x11, which would kiss the ends of the porch boards. In the photo, the current 2x8 (which is rounded and half-rotten) has the drills and box of screws resting on it.

Things went quickly downhill from there. The first thing we realized is that the newly added support was higher than the others, even though it was placed at the right height to meet the threshold at the top of the concrete steps.

The whole porch is built on a slightly-off-from-90-degree angle from the house, so that any water rolls away from the house towards the steps and the garden. The higher support would mean a) that water would roll back towards the house instead, and b) that the porch floor would be spongy -- you'd step on a cushion of air rather the solidity of being supported. That also means c) the porch floor boards would only be supported by two struts, about 7' apart (the two between my boot and Mel's back would not actually support or even touch the porch boards).

If we lowered the support strut, then the boards would be lower than the threshold, giving the water a perfect place to pool and start the rotting process over again. Damned if you do...

The second thing we realized was that we actually need 7'6" long boards, not 7'3" as we had measured. And had measured again. (We had measured repeatedly from a point in front of the door, which has a short extra sill -- a sill 3" deep, to be exact. You can sort of see the dark brown sill in the photo of me, above. We had reliability, but not validity, in our measurements.) The 2x11 option (of making a broader threshold at the top of the stairs) can't be extended to 2x14, at least, not without using two lengths of wood, which brings with it a seam down the middle and more chances of pooling water and fast rotting. The lumber we have is all 7' 0", if you recall.

This is all very hard to describe. The picture at left may illustrate adequately. I am standing on the steps to take the photo. The green at the bottom is the current "threshold", that oft-mentioned 2x8 laid flat at the top of the concrete steps. The line of wood just above that is our newly added strut (from which we've removed all but one bolt, so it's just resting there at the moment). The original struts cross the photo leading into the distance. You can see that the floorboard (coming down from the top) doesn't meet the strut. Damn it.



Solutions?

We have $250 of porch floor boards, and more importantly, a huge hole where the porch used to be, so we're not going back now. The current plan is to kill two problems with one, um, one laying of porch floor. We are going to pull the boards out all the way to the garden end of the top concrete step, so that water rolls all the way down and off onto concrete: nothing to rot. (Andrew will put a thin facing on the front of the step, so that you don't see raw ends of the porch boards.) Back at the "house-side" of the porch, all these boards will now end a full 12" from the outer wall of the house. There we will "patch", with a column of 12" long boards. With careful sawing, sanding, filler and paint, Andrew believes it won't show at all.

I have a bad feeling about putting all our ends on one plane (so to speak) and have raised the suggestion that we stagger the lengths of the boards across the whole space. This is what we feared that we would have to do on Tuesday, but now it seems little more work (to me) than the other plan, and it seems structurally more sound, too (although Andrew has convincing arguments for why it won't make a difference).

In any case, tomorrow we start by lifting the infamous "threshold" 2x8 plank and seeing what there is below it, which appears to be more wood, on top of concrete. We will do this before we commit to the other porch-boards-across-the-threshold plan. "No more surprises," Andrew said.