Well, I didn’t quite finish attaching all the faux concrete blocks to the porch’s concrete baseboard façade over the weekend, but I’m still very excited about the progress.
I have all the full stones attached to the front, but I still need to cut and attach the small stone pieces to fill these five small spaces.
And then I got this far along the way. I know the rotted baseboard is distracting. This will of course be replaced. I’ll replace that once I’m done with the stone baseboard.
But the reason I’m so excited about my progress even though I didn’t make it is because I’m past the hardest part – the curve. Things didn’t quite go as I expected, so I had to come up with a plan B. And this plan B worked much better than I expected.
So let me step back a bit and start again at this corner. I don’t know if you can tell from this “before” picture, but the corner of that porch was a complete mess.
It was neither square nor plumb. It was chipped and uneven. It was this corner that derailed my previous attempts to add any facade to the baseboard. So I knew that this time I had to tackle it and fix it before I could even attempt to attach the bricks to it.
But this time, since I’m a concrete expert now , the corner didn’t intimidate me. I knew I could easily build out the corner with the mortar mix. I didn’t take any pictures during the process because, as I remind you, the grout mix dries so quickly that stopping to take pictures during this process would have been too risky and might have resulted in an unrepairable mess. But I will describe the process.
The process was pretty simple. After using my hand sander to sand down the side of the concrete to remove any ridges, imperfections, dirt, any previous coatings that may have been applied by the previous owners, and making sure I only had bare concrete left, I sprayed the concrete with water and then used my trowel to apply a thick layer of mortar mix to the concrete. And then I used my steel carpenter’s square with the shorter (16″) side laying flat against the front of the porch and the long (24″) side against the side of the porch and starting from the bottom I slid it up to remove excess mortar mix, leaving a square corner.
The first time I did it, the edge of the steel square on the side didn’t come close to touching the mortar, so I had to add more. In fact, I had to do this about four times before the carpenter removed a significant amount of mortar from the side and smoothed the mortar. But eventually I had enough mortar on the side that the mortar was touching the carpenter’s square the entire 24″ width of the square and the square was smoothing the mortar the entire length from bottom to top.
Here is a front view to show you how much mortar I had to add to form this corner and make it square.
But that thickness decreased when it reached the 24″ mark on my carpenter’s square on the side, allowing the new mortar to penetrate the existing concrete.
Side note: When I’m working outside, Tiger is always near me. This is his favorite corner to sleep in, so he kept me company and entertained me the entire time I worked.
Once the mortar was dry I was able to wrap the bricks around the corner and continue down the sides.
The bricks on the corner didn’t work out the way I planned. I had planned to cut it at a 45 degree angle to wrap around the corner, just like I would when wrapping wood paneling around a corner. The idea seemed simple until I realized it was actually me not I am a mason and used my wet saw to cut a faux concrete block with a very uneven face at a perfect 45 degree angle, where the stone would have to be placed face down to get the correct angle, rather than using a miter saw to cut wood siding at a 45 degree angle. So I approached it differently.
I measured and marked how much stone I would need to cover the front of the porch and then made a straight cut with my wet tile saw.
And then I put the stone around the corner like this…
At this point, the mortar that remained in my bucket was a firmer, workable consistency, but had not dried out. It was still wet, but just firm enough that I could shape it with my hands. So I filled that corner with mortar and shaped it with my hands and mixed it with the bricks on either side to form a corner. I had to keep in mind that it needed to look like carved stone, so I didn’t aim for a perfect, sharp corner.
This is what it looked like from the side when the mortar was still wet.
And here is the corner view showing the front…
I’m pretty proud of how this turned out. In hindsight, I probably should have used the concrete mix instead of the mortar mix for this. The concrete mix I used for the stones uses a very fine sand as an aggregate, so it looks much smoother. The aggregate in the mortar mix is not large at all, but it is much larger than the fine sand, so it looks rougher. But I don’t think anyone will examine these corners as closely as I do. And when everything is primed and painted to match the stone of the rest of the house, I think it will look great.
As you can see, Tiger was also very impressed with my solution for the corner bricks.
Okay, well, maybe he wasn’t impressed, but I was. I’m almost done with this part of the project (i.e. attaching the bricks), and then all I have to do is mortar the spaces between the bricks, let it dry, and then prime and paint. I can’t believe that after all these years I will finally have finished baseboard on our porch.
I also need to work on that little area on the other side of the front steps. I can’t forget that! It’s not finished until the whole thing is covered.
Let’s see what Tiger thinks about it…
I’m pretty sure he agrees. This cat really makes me laugh. Every time I looked over at him he was in a new position. Some of his positions were so funny, but when I reached for my phone to take a photo, he would hear me and sit up to see what I was doing before I could take a photo. However, he is quite entertaining.
So that’s the progress over the weekend, and even though I didn’t get as far as I’d hoped, I’m okay with it because the hardest part (the curve) is done. After the hardest part is done, everything else should go smoothly.
