Remember that amazing stone porch? While the main portion is pulled away from the house a little big, the railings up the steps were leaning... well, kind of a lot.
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| It doesn't take an engineer to know that this is not right. |
We had hoped that maybe we'd be able to winch them together to straighten them out. It did not go as planned.
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| This is also not right. |
After 100 years or so, the mortar just wasn't having any of that, and as soon as the railing started moving, the one on the right also started crumbling. Fortunately, we already had a backup plan in place, which was to remove the railings entirely, use those stones to create pillars at the bottom of the stairs, and then adding metal or wooden railings in between.
That's a great plan, but it still means we have to break up and haul away all that stone. Turns out, that's way more time consuming than scraping off some plaster. The good news (I think) is that by the next weekend, this had happened all on its own.
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| Goodbye, railings. You were nice while you lasted. |
So now we still have to sledge up the stones and move them, but we don't also have to knock over the railings (admittedly, that was going to be the easy part of the job). Honestly, I think I like the look of the porch better this way -- it's a bit cleaner looking, I think.
We're still not quite sure what we're going to do about the rest of the porch situation, but we have a lot to keep us occupied while we figure it out... like moving rocks. So. Many. Rocks
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