Project # 2: Front Porch

I have spent a lot of time figuring out how to build a usable, beautiful, safe deck across the front of the house in an efficient, easy to build way. Following is what I have come up with and I think Dad and I can build it when I'm home.

 

I want something that will run across the front of the kitchen, as it used to. Originally the stoop was concrete with steps that ran down the hill. From this photo with George's wife Catherine, which I think was taken shortly after the kitchen was built, the concrete step was there from the beginning, even before the kitchen porch was! You can see in the photo that the original porch was much higher off the ground than I remember it, and there was a step on the front. This tells me the house settled over time.

I remember the old concrete step, with big cracks and big chunks missing, and grass growing up through where the concrete was gone. There were shiny smooth beach rocks in the mortar. Below is Grammy on the step summer 1986.

Dad used to place the hibachi on one of the steps when barbequing or boiling hot dogs. See the steps in the photo below, taken by Jim 1977.

 Thats George in later life, showing the concrete step was already a mess. 

When the foundation was "repaired" in the late 80s, the old concrete step was removed and replaced with a wood deck that just laid on the ground. Below is Mom and Dad sitting on the replacement deck about 6 or 7 years ago.

Remember the walkway  that went to the step? It was pressed concrete meant to look like bricks. This is me the day I left to move to Nebraska, 2001. We had just cleaned the moss off the walkway.  

I'm not able to put the steps back at the end, because the landscape has changed and the house is much higher in the air now, and we planted a Peonie hedge along where the steps used to be. See below.

So the new deck will be a little different. It will run across the south kitchen wall as the previous 2, but it will now be about 1 foot off the ground, so it will have one long step across the front. Concrete is expensive, it would eventually crack, and we can't pour something like that ourselves. Plus, the ground around the house will take years to settle, which would not be good for a concrete porch, so I want to build a floating deck. It will sit on concrete feet that will sit on top of the ground.  

 

When I started this whole project I rendered the house in a 3D program called Sketchup. You can fly around and through the house using a mouse. It is cartoonish, but you can add texture and colour and get pretty close to the real thing, and you can take snapshots at any angle, some of which are below of the deck design. It really helps when trying to visualize how something is going to look before its built. Below shows the area along the kitchen wall in the model. The deck will be 9 feet long and 5 feet wide. It will require 10 concrete piers that just sit on the ground, with 2x6 pressure treated framing. It will not be connected to the house. The step will be framed along the front, resting on concrete blocks buried in the earth.

When that is done, the framing is covered with 1x6 cedar decking, no stain, I'll just let them weather. The vertical sides, the risers, will be finished with 1x6 wood, painted the same white trim, Blackened, as the rest of the trim.

The bench will be bolted permanetly to the edge of the deck and will double as a railing. The bench was designed by one of my favourite architects, Sir Edwin Lutyens, a late 19th/ early 20th century English architect. The bench style is actually called a Lutyens bench. I found it online on a Canadian website. Its a stained teak. This is a photo of it from the website.  

For safety I'll bury a post in the ground with a steel post support, they have them at Home Hardware, and connect a short run of railing to it and the corner of the house with a stained wood round rail.

You'll notice in the model that the windows have shutters. There is a craftsman in Charlottetown who still makes real wood working shutters, and I hope to add these to the house eventually. Thats a project for another year.

 

So thats the kitchen deck project. I'll send a materials list to Home Hardware in Montague, pick up the materials when I get there, preorder the bench, rent a table saw, and Dad and I will put this together hopefully in a day, maybe 2.