My porch baseboard is finished! I’m so proud of the result, but most of all I’m thrilled that the porch baseboard is finished after all the years we’ve lived in this house. And best of all, the skirting now matches the stone on the left side of the house.
This is how it came about…
Just FYI: I haven’t finished installing the new panels yet. But I didn’t want the missing and rotted trim to be distracting in the first picture of the finished baseboard, so I edited the photo a bit to continue the new trim throughout the front. But in the rest of the pictures of the finished skirting, I haven’t edited it, so you can see the actual current progress, including missing and rotted fascia boards.
So let me back up a bit. In the last post on this project I had all the faux stones attached to the concrete base surface of the porch. At this point it looked like this…
The next step was to add the mortar between the bricks. I also bought a mortar bag and a mortar knife. And since Rapid Set Mortar cures so quickly (literally in minutes), I decided to add some Set Control to the mortar to extend the mortar’s curing time. The set controls worked really well.
I learned that as long as the mortar is in the bag, the working time is extended even further. I had not prepared any mortar in the bag and let it cure. So the key was to apply the grout one small section at a time, clean that section, and then move on to the next section. If I mortared too large a section at once, it was much harder to remove the mortar when I reached the end of that section. As long as it was still in the bag, it remained workable for up to 25 minutes. That’s the longest it’s taken me to get through a bag of mortar. So I’m not sure how long it would have remained usable in the bag.
I also found that the mortar knife was far from useless for me. I’ll leave that to the professionals. I ended up using my most useful tool – my fingers – to clean the grout lines. I had much more success with this than trying to use this mortar knife.
This is what it looked like after all the rooms were mortared. Here is the side of the porch…
And here is the front of the porch…
I really wish I could have left it like that. I thought it looked so great!
But of course the whole purpose of this project was to make this stone look just like the stone on the rest of our house. I wanted the two parts of the front of the house to be connected and look like this stone was originally part of the house. And unfortunately the stone on the rest of the house was painted when we bought the house. The paint when we bought the house looked very old and yellowed, so we had both the facade and the stone painted gray. In order for this porch stone to match the rest of the house, it had to be painted the same gray color, Sherwin Williams Mindful Gray.
So here is the new stone porch skirting in Mindful Gray (and without the machining to put the fascia all the way across)…
I had planned to finish the fascia boards and clean the entire area by the end of the day, but then I made the mistake of getting out my pressure washer to clean the porch steps and walkway. And once I get the pressure washer out, I might as well forget everything I had planned for the day. Is there anything more satisfying than pressure washing? So instead of finishing the fascia boards and cleaning up the construction mud, I ended up pressure washing the entire front steps, house foundation, and entire walkway. But today is a new day and I WILL finish these fascia boards and clean everything up.
Here is the small section to the left of the front steps.
I really couldn’t be prouder of the result. I don’t think anyone would ever think that these “stones” weren’t originally from the house. And yet I made them from scratch!
I made the textured silicone mats. I built the shapes. And I cast every single “stone” out of concrete.
Here’s a look at the porch baseboard on the left side of the house. I absolutely love how this brings the stone onto the porch and now ties the two sides together. It looks like it was always meant to be.
I’m so glad this project is finished. I don’t think my hands could have withstood another day of concrete work. You need a break! Today I’m going to install the fascia boards and clean everything up, and then I’m ready to move on to another part of the porch project. My pine tar and linseed oil for the porch are scheduled to be delivered today, but I think I need to repair the columns before I get to the pine tar. I also want to do a few smaller projects on the porch (mainly painting) before I apply the pine tar to the cedar porch boards, because once that’s done, it takes about 72 hours for each coat to dry. Therefore, the pine tar will be the last thing I do before I complete the porch renovation. But I love this progress so far!
