The old painters didn’t even finish.

This house is more comprehensive than a paint job.  The porch is sagging, the columns don’t match, the porch ceiling and floor are rotted and the entire end of the porch has to be rebuilt.  Plus new gutters, plenty of new siding, repairing old siding everywhere, and patches to the roof over the porch.

The major problem with the porch is water shedding off the house. Water runs fast over the 5″ gutter and onto the roof.  The only downspout is all the way to the right, and the water has to turn a corner inside of the front gable.  That’s why the porch ceiling rotted out just over the front door.  The shingles there are at too shallow a pitch and they’re cracked.  Everything in between is rotten too.  6″ gutters with downspouts at each end of the porch will fix the root of this.  But it made a big mess.

Most of this will be torn out.

 

Today was pressure washing and scraping, plus demo work and securing the porch corner from sagging any worse.

We put a post under the only good floor joist and a floor jack under the column.  The column was resting on a rotten 2 x 6 and the porch sagging by about 8″.  This rotten 2×6 plus tons of termite damage leave the porch end nothing worth keeping but a foundation.

Somebody tried to fix the termite damage at some point.  Here is a sistered joist that failed:

 

This is a temporary fix on the porch for the night.  The storms clouds headed over and we called it a day.

You can really see the porch slope in this picture.  We’ll jack it up next week.  There is a special order column for the far end which matches the other two.  I guess whoever fixed the termites bought an 8″ column at Lowes, an inch too small and cut 7″ shorter than the left column.  We won’t get that much swag out, but we’ll get close.  The middle column is going to need a bigger cap for spacing after the lift, and since the first column doesn’t have a cap at all, we’ll get to figure something out for all three.

To those that knew it as the Ronald McDonald house, take a last look while you can.  It should be mostly covered in primer by the end of tomorrow.