Thankful for Family

We had a full house here for the holiday and I took the opportunity to put them to work! With plenty of willing (or so they claimed) help, we were able to replace all of the headers, remove all of the temporary sports and get the stairs ready. The two pictures below show the porch in it's mostly final appearance (sans railing of course).

There was also several stair making classes! I decided to add a set of stairs on the side of the deck. With only the front stairs, people tended to drive into the driveway and then either walk around to the back door, or cut across the lawn to the front stairs. So I added a set of stairs to the side of the porch that would be pointing right at someone in the driveway! I added a little bit of flare to the outside stringers to make the stairs open up a little bit. Fortunately, my Dad was around to show me how to mark and cut custom stringers (with a minimum of wasted boards). Risers will be added later and I'd like to put deck lights in the risers so you can see the stairs when you pull in. Pops also cut the stringers for the front stairs and we got those attached, and I put the treads on a day later.



Also good shots of the posts and the new headers. All the headers are doubled 2x10's (4x10s?), so we should be able to safely support several elephants dancing on the roof (well maybe not dancing, 400 lb/foot * ~60 feet = 12 tons. The average adult african elephant weighs 5 tons, meaning that they would have to be dancing fairly gingerly and in the right place. Now the more local large mammal, the Holstein cow, THOSE could dance!). I used the 2x10's to be able to comfortable increase the span between posts, to reduce a couple of posts on the longer spans, but also because I wanted more reveal on the header beams. Looking around at other houses, good looking porches always seem to have a much deeper header, with lots of reveal.

This is the front pitch on the porch over the front stairs, there has ben a leak in the roof which I'll need to fix come spring, but in the meatime we had to tear everything out to the mini rafters. It actually looks rather nice open like this, I'm tempted to leave it.

Thanks again to all the family who helped out. It was cold, windy, and frozen, wet 4x10's weigh a hell of a lot. Despite all claims to the opposite, it was a lot of work and not really a fun way to spend a couple of days. But it wasn't something I could do alone, and I certainly appreciate all of the help.