Have you ever had a project that was so filled with bumps and curves that you wanted to just throw in the towel . . . but you couldn’t? Welcome to my front porch.
This summer, the hubster and I scoured pictures of porches. We had several discussions. Do we wrap the porch around the house? Do we make it rectangular? What should we do? The old front porch was falling apart. We had to do something. Finally we had agreed on a plan! Yay! We priced materials and we were ready!
We took apart the old front porch. And found cement stairs. Bump #1. The old wood porch was up too close to the front door. And now we knew why. It was made to cover the old cement stairs. We didn’t want to rebuild to that height, as it was creating issues with water and the door frame. The steps appear to be solid, not hollow like most concrete steps. So breaking them apart and removing them would be horrible. They did have some breaking apart on their own, probably why they were covered in the first place.
We were back to the drawing board. Ok, we would just make the new porch concrete and repair the steps. Plan B was ready to go. Except now we had a lot more demolition and removal to make a concrete front porch at ground level. Building a porch higher up was going to save us some work. *sigh* Bump #2.
We removed pavers and found electrical problems with the lights around the house. Not only was the electrical illegal, it was unsafe. Bump #3. Ok, we’ll just remove all the beautiful lights and replace with solar. We can cut the wires back in to the house and cap them. Solar lights are nice, that’ll work.
When removing the existing flower beds, we found there had been old cedar bushes in front of the house that hadn’t been removed. Baby Bump #4 . . just a little extra hard work to get those suckers out of there. That was the hubsters extra hard work! Yay for hubster!!
With the Plan A idea, the sump pump pipe was going to be hidden by a wood porch. Now that wasn’t an option; we thought maybe we’d bury it under the concrete. Except the pipe comes out of the house above the ground and the water would freeze before it got down below the frost line to shoot out to a drain field. Bump #5 is still being worked on. It’s just going to be a shoot out at the front of the house. We have til spring to come up with an attractive idea to hide it!
More bumps will be handled next spring with actually covering the steps to fix them. We have to agree on what we are doing around a concrete patio now, railings, flower beds, etc. – this will take awhile! And we have to fix the side of the house (hence my lovely wrap around porch idea!) where the beautiful patio is pooling water back against the house. The beautiful patio is going to have to come up. So I won’t think about that all right now.
No, for tonight I won’t worry about those other bumps! I am thankful that our concrete porch got poured today! I was doubting we could have it done this year with the curves in our plans and a two month hiatus for football/cheerleading season where we got nothing done at home. But, it is done! And it is slanted correctly to take water away from the house! I definitely have something extra to be thankful for this Thanksgiving!!
This picture might not look like much to anyone, but to me it looks A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!!!
Bug's Bright Side 