Daily Home Renovation Tips

Editor’s Note: We have asked, begged, pestered and finally received the story about the recent porch renovation from a friend of ours, Rebecca.  In Part 2, Rebecca had encountered carpenter ants and shoddy workmanship from a prior 40 year old renovation effort. Today, her adventures continue. If you would like to share your home renovation experience with us, please feel free to drop us a line. 

Sometimes, with an old house renovation job, you can get lucky. Sometimes you can repair and salvage and restore the work to its former glory.

In this case, however, our luck was of a different sort — because a complete tear-down and fresh construction was absolutely essential. No worrying about whether we could squeeze by for another year with a bit of patching up. There was no option.

Here is the before picture of the porch, to remind you what it looked like before the tear down and rebuild renovation began.

Part way through here is the next picture of a work in progress. Notice the mud room is completely gone and in the process of being replaced as part of the new porch.

This worked out really very well, since we’d had a whole winter’s worth of daydreaming time to set our hearts on a larger mudroom and veranda to replace the sad old porch!

Here is the final picture of the renovated porch, taken from inside the new wrap-around porch, complete with napping dog.



A strong new structure, built to code and beyond, with high-quality new materials — and roof trusses set in just 16 inches on centre.

That veranda’s a wonderful place to enjoy a coffee on a summer morning. And if it doesn’t last another 100 years, I’d be surprised; at the very least, our new mudroom and verandah will certainly outlast us!

Editor’s Note: Rebecca Leaman writes on nonprofit technology and web 2.0 for the Wild Apricot Blog, administers the Central Beekeepers Alliance website, and doubles as ‘Jen / domestika’ at Domestik Goddess and the Authority Blogger forum.