Wanna see my screened in porch project?

manaheim · Aug 16, 2009

If anyone's curious...

Untitled Document

Heh, I didn't title the document.
Actually, I probably should have made it into a blog. Durrr...

Yemme · Aug 16, 2009

You should blog it... you did good. Um...:er: did you do it??? If you did ... Your wife should never ask you for another thing ever.

You're in the penthouse.

manaheim · Aug 16, 2009

hehe, I did a heck of a lot of it. Obviously not all since my in-laws and friend helped, but I've been at least 1/2 of the labor involved, and sometimes the sole laborer.

c.cloudwalker · Aug 16, 2009

I realize you are new to this site so, let me tell you that a lot of people here will not bother to click on a link... :lmao:

c.cloudwalker · Aug 17, 2009

Now that I've read your story: are you a pro photog or an IT man? Or am I mixing people? Never mind. Let's talk construction.

It's interesting to note that what appears to have happened was that there was originally a standard deck, and the homeowners basically built directly up from that railing to make the screened in part. Odd and kinda lazy, but very much keeping in theme with most of the things in this house.

Not unusual at all. When I bought my 1920s house I was extremely happy that no remodeling or improvement had ever been done. Made my life a lot easier. At the same time I'll admit enjoying trying to figure out why people did what they did... I once spent a couple hours going nuts looking for an electric cable that I wanted to use in the next room. It turned out that somebody had built a wall right against the one my cable was in :grumpy:

"Well, I figured I'd pull all the siding boards down one by one, and then pull off the plywood, then knock down the railings and such," says I.

Thank God for Carl or you'd still be working on it.

This was the post nightmare that was. In this picture you can see the post with the 1/4 round on it. We basically built the thing up a bit using shims, added some extra support to the center part where the bottom post met the top part, and then boxed it in with various pieces. It was so massively off that we eventually had to give up and fill in the various spaces with about two pounds of wood filler. It was seriously like snug tight on the top and had a 5/8" gap on the bottom... and that would be completely reversed on the opposite side. It was whacked. In the end there was about 3/4" difference between the width of the opening to the left (between top and bottom), but that's WAY better than it was when it started. The post is also clearly a lot sturdier now as there are about 4,000 nails in it.

Here I have to ask why you didn't just replace that one. Seems to me you would have saved yourself a lot of work.

Is bead-board the same as German siding? German siding is what I had on the parts of my house that were not brick and that included the back porch which we redid kind of the way you did yours. The main difference is that I wanted to be able to use mine in the winter comfortably so I wanted to be able to turn the screened in porch into a glassed in porch.

Glass is heavy and I didn't want to deal with 8'x4' chunks of glass twice a year so we build the lower 1/3 as permanent glass with a rail on top and only the upper 2/3 as screen which could be switched to glass in the winter. Also built a cabinet of sort in a corner to store the glass in the summer.

Nice job!