This is such a typical renovation story that I’m sure you can relate to…

This past Saturday my buddy Ben came over to help me with the renovations. We planned on finishing the lower deck, cleaning up some electrical in the upstairs den, fixing an issue with the kitchen fan, and re-building the front porch stairs. It was an aggressive plan since the likelihood of us being able to complete that list was minimal.

The front porch is something that’s begun to bug us more and more. As we’ve renovated the inside of the house we’ve done nothing to improve the outside of the house (minus replacing the windows). The porch needs a lot of clean up and a new coat of paint. In addition the wood stairs were rotting and needed replacement.

With that in mind I began to take apart the front porch stairs at around 10:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. Ben was working his magic on the kitchen fan (the guy’s a genius when it comes to this stuff…he just knows how things work…what a friend to have!). It became very clear that not only were the steps rotten but so were the stringers.

Here’s a photo of the stairs now completely removed:

Once we had the stairs removed we discovered that the brick walls that were to the left and right of the stairs were crumbling! They were completely unsafe to leave as is so we had to remove them. We had been debating whether we liked the look of them or not…so this made the decision easy. But it was the typical renovation “peel the onion” scenario. The more you do…the more you find that needs to be replaced.

Once the brick walls were removed we took down the old, weed bushes that surrounded the porch. This opened everything right up.

Here’s what it looked like then:

Finally we began to re-build the steps. Here’s what it looks like now:

Lots of work left to do to get the porch done but it was a good day. Unfortunately we now have a pile of garbage on the front lawn…and this just after I had cleaned up the yard with a big dump run! The work continues!