Porch Revival

What was there before

A small red-painted porch with two steps, and by this summer it had had enough. The paint was going, the timber underneath was going faster, and the whole thing had that soft feel underfoot that tells you exactly how the story ends.

It also sat in a border that had quietly grown over it. Half the job turned out to be gardening.

Ripping it out

19 August, and the demolition was the easy part – a couple of hours with a pry bar and it was a pile of red-painted offcuts on the grass. That is always the deceptively satisfying bit.

Underneath there was an old concrete pad buried in the border that I had never known was there, and once everything was out I was left staring at bare dirt and a front door with a decent drop below it. That is the moment where a project stops being an idea.

Where the wood came from

The frame timber came from the ReStore, the Habitat for Humanity shop. Beams and 2x4s, pressure treated, and the whole lot came to about $65.

If you have not been in one, go. It is donated and surplus building material sold cheap, the money goes to Habitat, and for something like a deck frame – where you want sound pressure-treated timber and do not care whether it is pretty – it is hard to beat. That $65 would have been well north of $200 at a big-box store.

Stain everything first

One decision I would make again: everything got stained before it went together. Beams on trestles, boards laid out on the grass, all of it done flat and reachable rather than crouched over a finished deck trying to get a brush into the gaps.

The stain is Behr Premium Semi-Transparent Waterproofing Stain & Sealer in Russet No. 5117, a 3.79 L tin at $80. It is the colour the whole thing hangs on and I am glad I did not cheap out on it.

Some links below are Amazon affiliate links – if you buy through one I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Full disclosure.

The frame

Deck blocks down, posts up, beams on, then joists across. Nothing clever, just slow – most of the time went on getting things level rather than on cutting anything.

Two things worth the money here. Joist guards, the self-adhesive tape that goes along the top of every joist, because that top edge is where water sits and where a frame rots from first. And about five Simpson Strong-Tie 18-gauge galvanised gusset angles at $2.87 each, which is nothing for the amount of rigidity they add at the corners.

Decking

The deck surface is 5/4 x 6 8′ premium decking, the above-ground grade, and it was the single biggest line at around $350.

I over-bought on purpose. I had measured everything and knew what I wanted it to look like, but I did not want to get halfway through and find I was two boards short – or decide I wanted to go bigger. So I bought more than the plan needed and took the rest back.

That worked out well: eight boards returned at $12.68 each, a refund of just over a hundred dollars. If your store takes returns on uncut timber, buying long and refunding the remainder is a much less stressful way to run a build than a second trip mid-job.

Steps, lattice and lights

Three stair risers off the shelf for the steps, and a Suntrellis 4′ x 8′ pressure-treated lattice panel in brown at $45 to close in the side. The lattice does more than I expected – it turns an open deck into something that reads as a porch.

The screws were the lucky bit. I already had Paulin square-drive flat-head deck screws in the shed, which saved about $60, because a pack of 1,200 is not cheap and you get through a lot of them.

Then Hampton Bay 300-lumen solar motion-sensing deck lights in black, a two-pack for $35, set into the step risers. Solar and motion-sensing means no wiring at all, which after the LED pod lights on the truck was a welcome change.

Done

Six days from ripping out the old one to standing on the new one, spread across a couple of weekends and the evenings in between.

The thing I keep noticing is the drop. The old porch was two steps and always felt like a bit of an afterthought bolted to the house. Three steps, a proper deck, and the lattice down the side, and it reads like it was meant to be there.

What I would do differently

Deal with the border first. I spent a good chunk of day one gardening, not building, because everything had grown over the old porch. That was entirely predictable and I did not plan for it.

Buy the stain before you need it. Staining flat, before assembly, is the right call – but it means you need the tin on day one, not day three.

Over-buy the decking, genuinely. It felt wasteful at the till and it was the best decision of the build. The refund made it free to have been cautious.