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Wood for the porch rebuild has arrived

The wood for the porch rebuild has finally been delivered and it’s pretty impressive. I think the porch will out live the house.

Andre has spent a lot of time finding good wood at a good price and in the end we ended up with Douglas Fir from Quebec which is where a lot of the wood in the US comes from anyway, so by ordering direct from the timber yard we will have saved. It was still expensive though and we’re talking 5 figures. The order also included some lovely camura wood for the decking.

Incidentally Douglas Fir isn’t a fir tree, it get its name from  David Douglas, a Scottish botanist who first reported the species and what a tree it is. Grows up to 300′ tall and very much reminds me of the Californian Redwoods.

As mentioned in a previous post we plan to rebuilt the porch as close as possible to the original, notable exception being that we are making everything a little bit stronger, for example, the vertical posts are being upgraded from true 4×4’s to 5×5’s and hopefully it won’t be too noticeable.

Delivery day was a bit of shambles, the wood was supposed to be delivered between 8am and 12 noon but didn’t turn up until a little after 4pm due to custom holdups, during which time we had four people hanging around, including Aimee. Sucks that in this world of instant communication that the delay couldn’t have been passed on. Andre did try and call the shipping company but no joy. On top of this we had to hire a bobcat skid steer so overall quite an expensive day.

The lorry from Canada has numerous stops on its way, ours was the first and then down to Long Island and then the Carolinas. Aimee said that it was the longest lorry that she’s ever seen and it took quite a while to negotiate the turn at the bottom of the road. Cute that driver took his two young kids along for the adventure.

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I couldn’t be there for the unloading but Aimee and Andre snapped a good number of pictures. I didn’t realise what a big operation it was, so in no particular order, voila!

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These timbers are huge and the majority of these timbers have been stored indoors. Being a timber frame builder, Andre had a clever way to move them about, once on the ground, using a bunch of heavy duty rollers so carrying was down to the minimum.

It was dark by the time everything was tucked away.

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New Concrete Columns for the Porch

And what a pain this has been. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve been crazy busy at work and this is the second set of moulds I’ve made this project would have been fun.

Stepping back, I’ve been making moulds to form short concrete columns for the ground floor porch posts to sit on. Our existing ground floor porch posts were in contact with the ground which could lead to rot, hence the idea to add short concrete columns. Size wise they are about 17″ high by 7″ x 16″, wide enough to fit double columns on, with the corner columns able to fit three columns.

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The idea was to design the columns so they’d blend in with the existing architecture, not sure I achieved it but I think we’ve done a decent job and once painted and weathered, they’ll probably look as though they’re original, which is of course what I will tell everyone, hand chiseled over a century ago from the finest Kingston stone! First set of moulds were made of wood and ply and I made the parts at different times so when I went to fit everything together there were small gaps here and there which I wasn’t happy with.

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The second set of moulds were made from MDF and I tried to make all the matching pieces at the same time so everything would fit. Downside of MDF is that the dust from cutting it is terrible, unlike cutting wood, the particles left from cutting MDF is like flour so full respiration mask and vacuums are required. MDF is a versatile material but has its draw backs. If I were to do this again, I’d use pine again but back it with a sturdy baltic birch ply. MDF makes such a mess.

Everything was made using router table, table saw and miter saw.

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I coated the finished pieces with a penetrating epoxy and once set I applied a liberal coating of furniture wax. The last release coat will be cooking oil which Andre will apply on the day. I’ve only made two moulds one for the double column and one for the triple column so they need to be reused.

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We’ll need to fix a few small blemishes and also add a slight chamfer to the top so water drains away from the wooden post. Eventually we’ll get around to painting them.

Because the temperatures are now dipping below freezing (which can be disastrous for curing concrete), Andre constructed a 2″ foam box, which was then wrapped in shipping blankets along with a small heater on a thermostat. When I checked the temperature one night, the reading was about 12.5C/55F, which is great. In most cases the majority of the cure happens within the first 24 hours after which you are pretty much in the clear.