I promise I’m not intentionally trying to frustrate anyone, but I know I will anyway. I’ve made progress on the porch remodel, but I still haven’t tackled the one project I know we’re all most curious and excited about – the cast stone siding on the baseboard. As I started work yesterday, I decided I needed a little more time to research the exact products and processes I wanted to use to attach these stones. I don’t want to rush things, make a mistake and cause these stones to fail and fall off within a year. That’s why I took the time to do this yesterday and I think I’ve completed the process. I’ve made a list of everything I need and am hoping to stop by Home Depot today to pick up all the supplies so I can start tomorrow.
With the remaining time I had left yesterday, I decided to tackle the porch boards. A few weeks ago I was seriously considering completely redoing this porch and replacing it with a composite material like Trex. But for now I decided to sand and paint them. The fact is that while these boards looked really rough and pretty ugly at the moment, they are made of cedar. And cedar is a pretty sturdy, weather-resistant wood.
And while it doesn’t cost as much as a product like Trex, it wasn’t cheap. What made the porch look so bad isn’t that the boards were rotting and falling apart. It is that the last finish I used is worn and looks very patchy and worn.
Even in the areas around the edges where it looks the worst, only the previous stain had worn away. The boards themselves are still in great condition.
So since I have so many other projects I want to do and so many other things I want to spend my money on, I’ve decided that tearing down a perfectly good cedar porch and replacing it with Trex really isn’t the best use of my time and money. Instead, I took a few hours to sand the boards with 80-grit sanding wheels on my handheld rotary sander.
Once the old stain was sanded off the boards looked great.
In fact, they looked so good that I had trouble painting them for a moment.
But after going over the pros and cons of painting versus re-staining the boards, I’ve decided to stick with my original idea of painting them. I love the natural wood look of the boards. I love the wood grain and knots that give it the natural wood look. And once it’s painted, I’ll lose it all. The porch will be a solid dark brown color.
But I also know that if I re-stain it, I’ll be back out here in a year or two sanding and re-staining/sealing that porch again. And then I have to do it again and again every year or two if I want it to continue to look nice. I would like something that is much lower maintenance and I have high hopes that Behr Porch and Patio Paint will give me a much longer lasting finish.
As I was working on it and going up and down the steps, I realized that if I want to paint the porch, I also need to paint the stained wood portion of the handrails. And when I inspected the handrails, I noticed that I have a loose handrail.
The post is secure, but that one area where the handrail attaches to the post is not secure. Every time I reach for it it shifts about 1/4 inch. Since this is a security issue, this needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.
And as I was going through the steps that would be required to make the repair (which would involve taking apart the handrail and replacing the white piece of wood that the stained piece is attached to), I decided that I might as well use this opportunity to swap out these real wood pieces (just the white pieces at the top and bottom) with PVC panels. After all, that is my long-term goal. I want all non-cedar wood, which rots much faster than cedar, to be replaced with PVC board, which will never rot. So this project needs to be added to my list. And since an unstable handrail poses a safety risk, this needs to happen now.
And since I’m going to repeat this with PVC panels, I thought maybe I should replace those rotting boards on the columns with PVC panels too.
Yes, I could repair and paint it for now, but why would I keep throwing that can away when I know it needs to be done? The wood on all three columns is rotting, and since I’m in “porch makeover” mode, I might as well replace those. This may add two or three days to the time it takes me to complete these projects, but at least it’s done for good and I don’t have to waste time now fixing the problem only to have to come back to this project again in the future.
Plus, it looks much nicer when everything is done correctly and at the same time.
So that’s what I plan to do. This means that these really need to be done before I prime and paint the porch. Once the porch is painted, I like to give it two to four weeks to cure with minimal usage. Once it’s painted, I don’t want to stand on it, use power tools, ladders, etc. anymore. But at least the porch is now sanded and can be primed and painted when I get to that point.
Tomorrow I’ll start on the skirting board. Once that’s done, I’ll repair the handrails and replace the white boards with PVC boards. As I remove the handrails from the columns, I replace the rotted wood on the columns with PVC panels and then reattach the handrails. And when that’s done, I’m ready to prime and paint the porch. And once that’s done, the porch renovation is complete! There won’t be anything hanging over my head that I have to do again in the fall or next year. Everything will be taken care of. No more wood to rot and no more porch boards to re-stain next year. At least that is the goal.
