Saving the Porch

Ok, it's been a long time since I posted last. The good news is that the delay means we've been working hard at actually doing things and haven't had time to write about them.

One of the things that got done is some work to keep that nasty crack in the front porch from spreading.

This is the crack.

And by "spreading," in this case, I mean "opening up even more and thus completely separating the front pillars from the rest of the porch, causing the whole thing to collapse into a pile of rubble and sadness."

To start off, Chris had bolted the porch together. We figured that at the very least, this should help us know if the porch was actively continuing to settle/fall, and at best, might keep any additional shifting from occurring.

Bolts!

Then my dad came up to help out for a day on the farm, and he and Chris got to work on the porch. The plan was to truss it all up, jack up the roof to take the weight off, and then use come-alongs to draw the two pieces of porch together.

Like so.

This did pull things together slightly, but it ultimately put too much pressure on the pillar at the corner, and we realized that if we pulled any more, we might just pull the pillar down. That would have been counterproductive, so we abandoned the rig before things went too far.

The good news was that during the assembly of this contraption, we had found that the front line of the porch wasn't actually that far out of plumb -- in other words, it had pulled away horizontally more than it had tipped forward. That allowed us to still feel pretty darn good about it when we moved on to plan B -- fill in the crack.

Mortaring the crack.

 By the end of the day, Chris and Dad had the whole thing filled in. Unsurprisingly, this made the porch look significantly less run down.

The braces are off now, and I have to say, this is probably one of the best things we've done so far. It also helps that the rock pile up front has dwindled significantly as Chris -- with the help of various parents -- has been steadily breaking up and carting away the former porch railings. Simply not having the porch look like it has a huge crack that's about to topple the whole thing down into the yard is a major leap in curb appeal -- and now we have a porch we really can feel good about sitting out on to eat lunch or take a break!