On the Eighth Day, We Finished the Porch

Technically, we only worked on solely the porch for six days, but we feel as if we started on it last Tuesday, when we bought the lumber. (If you recall, we then finished other projects and fought the heat for a couple of days before starting). But however long it took, the main part is done now.

We started the end with a couple of new boards -- 14' 2x6s, which we used to form an extra strut to support the porch floor. It turns out that Home Depot is geared towards contractors (okay, we're slow). It cost $10 for these two humongous boards -- it would have cost $8 for boards half that length. So it's cheaper to buy in bulk. Andrew said it was dicey driving home with wood sticking this far out of the car.

We also rented Andrew's current favorite tool, an Angle Nail Hammer. This is a totally cool sort-of stapler which you position over the porch board and then whack with a hammer (once if you're big and beefy, three times if you're wimpy and at the end of the day). It drives a nail-like staple in at a perfect 45 degree angle, affixing your porch board permanently to whatever you're hammering it on to (which very occasionally, unfortunately, is not the thing you intended to hammer it on to).

We decided in the end to solve the length problem with a 10" wide "threshold" in front of the door (a slab of pine) -- so in front of the door, we only needed the 7' boards. You can see the white board in place under/in front of the door in the picture. For the 40 inch space to the left of the door we pieced porch boards together to make 8' combinations with 7' planks. This involved sawing the boards into combinations that would add up to 8' and which coincided with where there was a strut to nail it to and which kept the seams far from the rain danger of the front of the porch (leaving only the options of 1' + 7' and 2' + 6'). This meant that I learned how to use the Skilsaw, so that Andrew could be punching the Angle Nail Hammer on one board as I prepped the next.

The final product is very fine. It is thrilling to walk on this tight, non-creaking, solid surface, that we put together ourselves in only a few hours. There is some metaphor in the fact that we were able to repair and build the floor underneath our feet. Perhaps it is particularly poignant to us because we spent several days in the "pit" created by the porch walls, so we are quite aware of how the porch floor is 3 feet above ground. To me, it still feels like I'm walking in air when I walk across it.

The work is not entirely finished of course. We would just stain the wood if the whole porch were in this pretty wood, but half is still the old green, so the whole thing will be painted. So next, there is patching, priming, and painting (butter yellow) to do (my job) while Andrew finishes the balustrade and the railing down the steps.