Home Renovation: The Porch Stairs

This is the beginning of what will probably be an insane amount of posts over the next couple years. We are back in the saddle again.
After a brief break during which our son was born, we are back at it folks. Let the home renovation antics begin!

Lesson #1: All home renovation projects will take anywhere from double to triple the amount of time allotted. It’s just one of those cosmic laws.

Lesson #2: Having a baby and doing home renovation will lengthen all projects further than cosmic laws listed in lesson #1.

That said, here we go…..
We decided, being Memorial weekend and all, what better time to get back into the exhaustive and extensive renovation on our 1926 Bunglow.

Our front porch is in need of a total overall, but we have bigger priorities right now (like having a bedroom without ladders, drywall and other such non-sense in it) and decided we would replace the top portion of the steps which are currently rotting, spruce up the paint and then be done with it for a couple years. Ah, likely story.

We went to Home Depot, picked up the wood and showed Alec what would soon become his 2nd home. Went and when we removed the front step, lo-and-behold the stringers (or base) of the steps were rotted as well. Damn!
So, back to Home Depot to get stringers. Unfortunately the brainiac who owned this home previously did not create the standard size porch. We’ve run into this on numerous occasions. The previous owner isn’t always at fault though, it is an older home and that means although it is wonderful and full of character…it is also a pain in the ass because nothing is “standard” anywhere.
But we bought the stringers and went home once again. (At this point you might be wondering why we didn’t tear it all apart at once to get a more complete shopping list—I have no answer for you other than we’re artists and although we’re getting quite adept at home renovation…we’re still artists and a bit disorganized sometimes.) The 4-step stringers didn’t fit because the nimrod created his “own” stringers instead of buying the standard sized ones, and be-damned we were not going to tear apart the whole damn porch…we were going to make this work. So we went to Menards (because Home Depot was out of the 5-step stringer) and went back home once again and cut those mothers so they would work. All told…3 Home Depot trips and 1 Menards trip later, we are still not done…..but getting closer.

The porch stairs are done…but since we had to tear off the railing to put the new stairs in….and since the aforementioned railing is obnoxiously cute with hearts cut out of them, why not replace them as well as the railing on the porch? What the hell right? This is how all of our projects go. They always take on a life of their own and evolve into a much more complex project than originally intended.

So, here we are…the porch is primed but not painted yet and it has no railing. Lets all do a mantra that the mailman doesn’t kill himself on the porch, although he is probably grateful to be treading upon new steps since the old ones were a disaster.

Stay tuned for the continuning sagas of the porch!