They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To...

So anyone who has had a porch beer at our house knows that our front porch ceiling looks like this...

Because the second floor porch was rotted, when it rained the water came down through the paneled ceiling, hence rotting the panels (and the porch floor beneath, but that's another story for another day...) And we haven't been able to fix it until the second floor porch was fixed, stopping the leaking. Now that it is - this weekend's project was fixing the panels!

Simple right? Go to the store, buy some panels, throw 'em up, easy peasy!

Siiiigh, when will I learn? WRONG! Well, let's start from the beginning... First Nick tore down all the unusable rotted panels still up.

Next, we had to deal with the fact the new panels were WAY thinner than the old ones (which we knew before we walked out of the store).

So we took some old lath [still] laying around, and we used them as shims! (Am I using that word correctly?)

(We so heart the nailgun!!)

TaaDaaaaaa!!

We hold up one of the boards - it's JUST the right depth! PERFECT! ALRIGHT! We are on the right track, things are working out, let's keep this momentum going... Three hours later we have....

Wah waaaaaah.... oh wait... that one's the wrong size... take it down... Ok, we have one line of boards done by 8:00pm Saturday night... awesome. So much for a one day project... that's okay, we'll start again bright and early tomorrow...

Sunday morning: more measuring, more cutting, more sanding, some more measuring... (measure twice, cut once, kids...) Finally the aluminum trim around the inside of the porch was just TOO in the way, so I declared "TEAR IT DOWN! I'LL BUILD A NEW ONE OUT OF WOOD!" (This may be what's giving me my mostly-undeserved confidence about being able to build anything I want...) And what did we find...

TREASURE!! Okay, not treasure in the normal sense, but treasure to anyone who owns a 100 year old house with tons of crappy 60's veneers on it! Original wood moulding and beams... in pretty good shape too, thanks to the siding... some sanding and a coat of paint, and this sucka's good as new...

Nick's excited... (Okay, maybe that's his "fake excitement for you, crazy lady" face...)

And so by noon when I have to leave we have:

Still pretty lame for another 3 hours of work... but that's okay, I know as I go off I'm leaving the project in good hands... and when I come home we haaaaaave:

HUZZAH!!! Completion! Okay, maybe this should be another WAH WAAAAH for a whole weekend's worth of work, but this makes me a happy girl, and once it's painted, it's gonna be awesome, so cheers to porch beers under a pigeon-free, leak-free roof!!!