The Porch Progresses, slowly.

This is, in fact, the project that never ends. There is a small bit of light at the end of the tunnel, however. This past weekend included setting the stone atop the stair walls and beginning the shingling of those walls.  We had to remove the temporary steps to do that.

The floor has two coats of sealer and three coats of oil.

Getting there....still need some trim.

Walls, almost done!

Stone, mortared into place and everything!

The blue thing is our foul weather canopy, lowered for the night so it doesn't blow away.

So, looks good, right? Almost done? HAH! Now we just need to put in the real steps (tigerwood treads, painted risers), strip the old columns, replace missing trim pieces on them, varnish the ceiling, replace trim around the ceiling, find and install a porch swing, and figure out what colors we're going to use.  And oh yeah, we still don't have a railing.......

Finally, a reprieve!

Thankfully, the porch project is officially on hold until we:

1. Have enough money to pay cash for the next round of construction materials (decking and siding - very spendy)
   
2. Winter is wrapping up and it's not raining every day
3. Feel like working on it again.

I'm very happy to have this behind me for awhile. This weekend, for example, instead of getting up with a sense of dread and impending crankiness, I got up and put Christmas lights on the boat for the Queen City Yacht Club lighted ships parade. Much more fun.

We got the stairs and walls in. Oh, and when I say we, I mean me. Concrete foundation, framing, everything me. Ginger helped with stair stringers. The stairs are temporary until we decide on what decking material we're using. Also, still haven't moved the big rock into place as the first "step", though the neighbors are impressed with its sheer size. It weighs 2,607 lbs. Waiting on a friend and a track hoe. Neat!

Now that's what I call progress.

Now that's what I call progress., originally uploaded by gingershana.

Check it out! We spent this morning being really productive. Visible progress, that's what I like. Progress the neighbors can see. Progress that makes it look as if we're working. Fun. Also, notice the lights in the ceiling. That happened last weekend. Woohoo! All sorts of progress.
Do you like our front stairs? We find that it has really cut down on solicitors and political activists. At night, we just pull up the ladder and we're safe in our own personal castle. Also awesome because Lola can come out and lay in the sun, but she won't jump off. She hates the nail gun, though, so that limits her a bit.

As usual, click through to Flickr and see more pictures.

Clinging to September, but curling up for winter

Sad as it is, I guess we have to admit that summer is over and we have to say goodbye to photos like this. We must batten down and prepare for 7 months of gloom and rain. But I'm ready for the worst: I just got my flu shot.

We just had this fantastic September with non-stop sunny days, balmy temperatures and cool nights for almost four straight weeks. It was what Seattle weather in September is hyped up to be, but this time instead of saying to people "It's usually pretty nice in September, sorry about the weather" instead it was "This is awesome, better take in every minute."

So we did. Part of September was spent in the Gulf Islands soaking up the sun and getting in an actual, full blown relaxing vacation. Vacations end though and we returned to daily grind of getting up at 5:15 to beat traffic, working, and then coming home to... THE DREADED PORCH PROJECT. I complained all summer about this, and it really did ruin every weekend we were in town, including this one.

Some progress was made, but it's not done - not even close. One of my more nosy neighbors said "You're just going to leave it like that, with no shingles all winter? I could never do that!" How do you respond to this stuff? Do you say, hey lady, this stuff costs money and in case you haven't noticed, we're in a recession. Or "Guess what, my wife and I work 50 hours a week so forgive me if I'm too tired to work on this every night. I have a life and sometimes it includes not restoring something."

We finally got the front door in last weekend and the exterior door trim, got the beadboard ceiling in, got all of the bare wood covered with tar paper for winter, put the electrical in, insulated most everything. Now we just need to rebuild the column bases, the stairs and walls, put on a new deck, and shingle everything. Piece of cake right? Wrong: cedar siding is $1.31/lineal foot. I need a raise like fire needs oxygen.

Sorry, this post was supposed to be about fall but I digressed into the porch. Typical.

We managed one more boat show in September, the Poulsbo Rendezvous. This is always the least well-attended boat show by the public, and therefore it's the best show of the year. It's very relaxing - hanging out with your boating friends swapping stories about where you took your boat this summer and what happened, who ran aground, who went the farthest, and generally ignoring the tourists.

So now we begin to curl up for winter. We've both already caught and mostly gotten over our first cold, although this one hung on me for two weeks. Everything in the garden is starting to mildew and yellow, pretty soon we'll be planting bulbs and spreading compost. Before you know it we'll be carving a pumpkin and planning Thanksgiving. Life goes by fast, I wish I could slow it down just a little bit.

Gee, that looks like quite the project.

So, currently the only things holding up the front of our house are six (6) two-by-fours. Fun! Mark and our friend Jon have gotten a heck of a lot done today. Thanks, Jon!

Jacked,

braced,

disassembled.....


They managed to figure out a way to do it so that we don't have to take the column trim apart. We can slide the new column up into it instead. We'll see how that works in reality later. But at least instead of three separate column segments, it will be one continuous 4x4.



The biggest question remains, however: why does this work always seem to happen on the hottest days? (See yesterday's post - yeah, it's that hot) Also, today is the Greenwood Classic Car Show, which means that all day people have been parking in our neighborhood and walking past our house. And doing double-takes, most of them. It's pretty funny to watch.

Porch redux.

How do I start this conversation? You see, I had NO INTENTION of starting the porch project this season. This year really. We're fresh off 6 months (yes, six months) of solid non-stop work on SWIETENIA. More on the old boat - a lot more - in later posts.

I was looking forward to a tranquil weekend of boat rides and BBQ's, maybe some weeding in our aforementioned 100% drought tolerant parking strips. But Ginger wanted to open up what I knew to be an ENORMOUS can of worms. I knew the posts were rotten, that the sill plates were shot and I knew it would be a long, expensive, and difficult project. Much like what we just went through with the boat. Which won 3rd place in the Opening Day parade, BTW. See I'll get everything in this post...

Let's look at a before picture:

Acceptable-looking sort of. but enough for another year. Yeah I know there are problems but the layman doesn't and probably wouldn't even notice the death-lean of the step walls. The insurance company doesn't know there aren't any railings. But, alas, Ginger wanted to get rolling on it, so on the hottest May 17th on record, we get going on a project that I predict will last the next six months.


Upside: Chainsawing down that craptastic old lilac was highly satisfying. Thank you STIHL.

What I didn't know was this: That it would take five dump loads - so far - and that good ceiling boards are $0.71/LF right now. We only need, oh, 900 lineal feet or so of those. And a new front door. And a new deck. And a new railing. And new steps. And new step walls. And we have to completely start over on the columns save for a little bit of trim. And the column foundations need a skim coat. And the step walls need a new concrete foundation. And we need new CDX sheathing on everything. And the price of gas was $4.15 today. And this is why I might be grumpy sometimes.

Why are house projects so much less satisfying than anything else? I can sand the boat all day. As tiring as that can be, I guess that IS better than raking petrified raccoon poop out from under my front porch in 90 degree heat with a respirator sliding off my wet, dirty, sunburnt face... Yeah, I'll take the sanding.

"Is this the path to self-actualization?"

The First Post.

So I figure our first blog post should probably be about posts. Porch posts, to be more precise, or perhaps the lack thereof. We've begun our summer project by lugging approximately 3,220 lbs of detritus to the transfer station over two weekends.

That's five full-sized pick-up loads, if you're keeping track. So what do we have to show for this?

Well, we've got some very rotten posts, some rotten ship lap, some really nice original cedar siding painted a really rotten green, and a little less nasty yellow vinyl siding that will sit in the landfill and never rot.

Also, we met a lot of neighbors while Andy's truck sat on the sidewalk. One of whom then asked us to dogsit for her.

The very best part of the whole thing was this: the largest, heaviest load? The one that consisted only of stuff that we found UNDER the porch. 1,160lbs of stuff, to be exact. I'm sure that saving all that stuff seemed like a good idea to whoever put it under there, but I'm not sure that short ends of 2x4's, the previous set of steps (rotten, what a surprise!), and old, damp, nasty bags of joint compound are my idea of useful. Although the raccoons sure seemed to appreciate it at some point in the past.

I'll let Mark tell you how much fun he had with the chainsaw.