Laying Ground Work

For the very first time in this almost two-year long process, I finally feel a sense of satisfaction with old-home restoration. Up until now everything was on paper. Theoretical. And honestly, until now it was just two years of tedious, anxiety-producing list making, picture drawing and magazine flipping.

After the porch demo, they started laying the groundwork (literally) for a proper porch installation. To address some water issues we've re-graded the area under the porch. At the foot of the future new steps they dug an 18 inch trench and filled it with gravel. This will prevent the stairs from heaving or shifting during the winter freeze.

Even though this amounts to a pile of sand and rocks, it gives us great pleasure to see something done right, and know that the end result could last another 50 plus years.



In the meantime we're still stuck on shingle colors. We narrowed it down to the two shown below. Don't bother picking one, because the photo on here tells you absolutely nothing about the true color. The color changes from photo to photo, monitor to monitor, and also from morning to noon, cloud to sun.

We pretty sure we're going with the one on the right. It is a very very light gray. It almost looks white, unless you see it next to something that is actually white, which is why we have the footrest out there in the photo. The trim will be white. Window sashes will be black... we think...


And here is our future porch deck, neatly stacked on a clean job site (a good thing). And there's our very own port-o-potty. We originally questioned the need for one... but after seeing some of these guys I'm glad we went for it!