porches

Work on the rebuilding the back porch continues; a temporary fix to the front porch.

the back porch

The structure of the bottom floor.

The guys have been busy out back. A solid structure for the bottom floor was put up on Monday, while the flooring was put in on Tuesday. Today, 2 of the columns went up, and the part of the 2nd floor structure that attaches to the house was put into place.

With flooring and columns.

The flooring that is being used is a wood-plastic composite, brand-name Tendura. From their website: “TenduraPlank is manufactured from plastic and by-product sawdust, which means that no new trees are timbered expressly for the purpose of creating it. Where possible, we use recycled plastic. TenduraPlank is a non-leaching product, which means that nothing filters out of TenduraPlank into the aquifer. In addition, TenduraPlank has a longer life than traditional timber product.” All of this means that the boards look+feel much like wood, but wil last much longer. We are still leary of adding more plastinc to the house, though.

the front porch

One of the smaller projects for last weekend was to ‘find out why the front porch starting to pull to the right’. Going in, it seemed that the bottom corner support was starting to sag, pulling everything down and out a bit. I was thinking that maybe I’d have to rebrace it a little. It turned out, though, that much of the support structure was rotted and/or termited, and that it had been half-ass braced once before already.

The column to the right is getting off of verticle.

See the space opening up between the column and the detail piece?

More rotten wood.

I spent a 6 hours or so pulling out both rotted wood and ‘fixes’ from before, and then rebuilding as best I could. It was a little scary — once I got into it, I couldn’t see why the floor hadn’t collapsed yet. I managed to get everything solid enough to last longer than the 2 years or so it’ll be before we can get in and really rebuild that area. It feels wierd to put up something ‘temporary’, but we’ve got too much else going on right now to take on another project.

It was fun+scary being up under the porch — I found a dead black widow the size of a nickel!