Before and after

Finishing touches

DONE!!  It been a while since this page was updated, because we've been on the exponential tail of the project.  The part where there's steadily decreasing bits of little things to do.  Doesn't help that November has been mostly dark and rainy, so not very photogenic.  But the sun finally came out today so I could snap some pictures of the finished product...

The view down the porch from the driveway side, with all the stone columns finished.

A closeup of one of the stone columns.  The stonework turned out beautifully, and the landscaper bought all the extra stones off of us for another project.

I put up the finishing touch on the porch -- the house number.  The number actually came from a hardware store in Venice Beach, CA.  We were visiting Bob Pappalardo and admiring all the craftsman bungalows in the neighborhood there.  We liked these simple numbers on a house there, and then stopped into a local hardware store and found exactly the same style.  They've been sitting on our kitchen sideboard for years, waiting for an appropriate porch to be attached to!

A not-as-glamorous finishing touch is that we rerouted all of our gutters into a couple of large drywells.

A new bluestone walkway leads from the driveway to the side of the porch.  The drywells have been buried under our front yard, which is why it's currently a big mudpit.  No use trying to get grass started this time of year.

Our new front walkway replaces the old narrow concrete sidewalk.

Stonework begins

The masons showed up today and started applying the stone veneer to the bases of the porch columns.  It's a very meticulous task of fitting all the right sized stones together.  I wanted the mortar "raked deep" so there's not room for covering stuff up with a lot of mortar.

Here's a closeup of the first two column sides that are done.  We're very happy with it!  The stone is a black and white striped schist from eastern Connecticut, full of sparkly metamorphic crystals, green crosscutting veins, and even a few garnets and pyrites.

The stone has been cut into slices and corner pieces a bit over an inch thick, so it just rests as a veneer on top of the column box.  This was much, much cheaper than making it out of solid stone.  This is just a view looking at the same post in the opposite direction from the previous picture.

The electrician also came by today to install the lights in the porch, and the new ceiling fans.  Our plan in the summer is to sit out on the shady porch with cool drinks under the fans.  Ah, the lengths I will go to in order to not have air conditioning in the house...

The painter also put on some finishing touches today, which really makes all the moulding details we put in the gable end stand out.

The painter also stained the outside of the new front door, making it a much nicer old wood color.

...and finally, because Meg requested it on Facebook, here's what the front door windows look like with the outside light shining in.

Front steps, brackets, and paint

The porch now has steps so we can walk up to our front door!  The new walkways will be eventually graded up to meet the bottoms of the steps.

Closeup of the gable end with the new brackets installed.  The carpenters made up custom brackets in the shop out of stacked Azek material.  They bonded them together, slathered them down with some kind of joint compound, and then sanded them nice and smooth.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the siding has been painted now.  We're very happy with the color - thanks to Mom and Caroline for helping us pick it out!  There's still some more paint to go on the trim, and the front door to be stained.

Siding finished, porch progress

It's been a busy week of always coming home after dark, so I missed a couple days of pictures, but things are starting to look close to being finished!  It certainly helps that all the siding is now up, so the painters can start their job.  First, a walk-around of the front of the house at the end of today...

 The railings are up, the tapered column boxes are covering the roof supports, the durarock boards have been installed around the column bases, the trim boards covering up the underside of the porch are installed, and the final trim around the front door and windows on the porch is done.  What you can't see from the outside is that the plasterers also came and patched up the walls that had been damaged where the door and windows were replaced.  Still to come: front and side stairs, and stone facing on the bottoms of the columns!

 

A final bit of trim was applied to the outside of the attic awning window, to break it into three panels.

A closeup of one of the tapered columns.  The carpenters made these up back in the shop (where they could do more precision work) and then brought them over in the truck and slid them on.  There's still a little bit of trim to put around the bottom where it meets the bluestone.

The current view down the porch.  It's getting much easier to envision the finished product!

New front door

Our new front door was installed today!  The trim around the outside and the plaster around the inside still need to go on, so the temporary wall is still up in the hallway, which means I can't take a pretty picture yet of what the stained glass panels look like from the inside.  But it looks great from the outside!  It will eventually be stained the same color as our interior floors and doors.

Meanwhile, lots more siding went up today in the back and south side.  Now we're a tiny bit more than halfway around the house.  A lot of time was also spent today plugging the screw holes on the porch decking, which looks great up close but at the resolution of this blog it won't show up.

Porch ceiling and floor

Lots of exciting things in the past couple days...  It's really been a hive of activity!  Wednesday was electrical day: the electrician came and roughed in the new wiring for the porch lights and ceiling fans, as well as a new back door light, a new driveway motion detector light, and a couple new exterior plugs.  He also rerouted the TV cable to the upstairs, which had previously just been hanging in the outside of our old siding (lazy cable installers).  No exciting photos of wires to show.  Thursday and Friday have seen lots of work on the porch trim, porch roof shingles, and siding in the back.

The porch as it looks now!

Mom and I had the inaugural "first cup of coffee" on the porch. 

The kids wanted to join in the fun, now that it's safer to be up there.

We picked out Azek decking boards for the porch.  Should be almost maintenance free, and they feel very solid.

A shot of the almost-finished porch ceiling.  It's split into three parts with false beams in between, to accentuate the entryway over the front door, as separated from the rectangular areas on either side of the entryway.  In the center over the doorway is a junction box for a hanging entry light.  In the center of each side rectangle is a junction box for a ceiling fan, flanked by dimmable canister lights in either side.

Here's the part that was giving us all headaches to figure out how it gets put together in 3-D.  This is where attention to detail really pays off.  Tony's suggestion of how to finish off the rake boards looks very nice, and you can see that they wrap around where the end of the gutter will eventually go.  There was also a big discussion about how to finish off the bottom of the boards that cover the bottom part of the gable end.  The funny thing is that we thought of several possibilities, and then when the carpenters finished it with something that was slightly different than what we discussed, it just looked so right that I didn't even notice the change until they pointed it out.  A few decorative brackets will be added here before it's all done.

I was hoping to have a picture of our new front door installed.  Unfortunately, it arrived damaged last week, so they sent it back, and now the door is expected to arrive Monday.  But to prepare for the door installation, Tony built a temporary wall in our front hall.  It's just held in by friction on rubber pads so it doesn't damage our paint or newly refinished floors.  In a couple days, the old cracked wooden door and lead-paint-peeling-sidelights will be torn out, and the whole bay will be replaced with a new, nicer, insulated door and sidelights.

Meanwhile, siding installation continues around the back of the house.

A closeup of the library window, with the roughed-in electrical boxes for a plug below and driveway motion-detector light above.

The siding now extends around to the kitchen bow window.

Start siding!

The most exciting thing that happened yesterday was that the first wall of siding went up!  The color is just the primer, the final color will be slightly darker and greenish-greyer.

Meanwhile, the porch carpenters worked on some of the trim detail on the gable end over the door.  It turned out that the architectural cross-section drawing neglected a crucial detail on how these trim pieces were supposed to overlap, so the carpenters had to extend the roof out 3/4" to make it all work.  Good thing the lead carpenter is also a cabinet maker, and worried about the small dimensional details.

The mistakes with the trim around the front bathroom window were also torn off, and it was redone to look more like the drawing, and make the false side panels the same size as the window.  We're thinking of painting the inside square of these panels a contrasting color to bring out the 3 side-by-side squares.

Finally, the trim work was completed around the new downstairs bathroom and kitchen windows.