Death of the old back porch

Last year, in restoring the 2-family house, I had to decide what to do with the old back porch. After removing the vinyl siding it became obvious that the porch had some very serious problems. There was bad rot in the roof structure, in the support posts and in the floor. The porch was quite shaky and unstable. On close inspection, all the parts of it were of relatively recent construction, probably 1930s. There was evidence that an earlier porch had been in this place and taken down before this one was built. I decided that the best thing to do was to demolish the porch.
We had put up some temporary supports to keep it from collapsing before we were ready for that. Then we cut away the original support posts, pulled away the temporary supports and let the roof collapse. Once the roof was down, we tore apart the roof and floor and built a new floor structure.
That was all last summer. This summer, as our last piece of work to complete the house, we built a Gothic-style porch in its place. I will show pictures of that project tomorrow. Here is the work from last year:

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Dave and Mark with the old porch propped up.
( Eight more pictures )

Tomorrow: Building a Gothic Porch!

Building a Gothic Porch

I decided that I wanted to build a distinctive porch in a mid-19th century style on the back of the house. The earliest part of the house was built around 1850, and at that time, Gothic Revival was one of the most popular styles for houses in this area. It also happens to be my favorite style. I knew of a handsome Greek Revival house, built around 1850, outside of Oneida, NY with an attractive Gothic Revival style porch. I went there and took lots of photos and studied the details of how it was built. Then we started making up parts in the shop: octagonal columns, lattice-work that fit together with rabbeted joints and quatrefoils (made using bandsaw, jig saw, hole saw and router). We built the framing and cornice, then put on a roof, and finally added all the decorative woodwork. I am very pleased with the results!

The Gothic porch in Oneida:
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( Building the new porch: 14 photos )