The Joys Of Summer

One of the joys of owning an older home is that it will usually have unique characteristics, unlike modern tract home developments. The downside is that as well built as many older homes were, aging and wear are still a constant. In my case, the house was built in 1895. Although it's mainly brick, there's the usual wood trim outside, and also a porch dating at least to the 1960's, although possible older in it's original form. According to one of my neighbors, the trim on my home had not been painted since he built his house in the late '60s. Which would explain why about 25% of the trim was bare weathered wood.

As The Wife and I have worked on this over the last couple of years, we've hoped to upgrade our front porch. The oldest picture we've found of our home dates to 1976, and it notes that the colors of the house were the same as when we bought it. Also present are the wrought iron rails and supports on the porch. When we notice that the weight-bearing wrought iron was starting to look like this on the bottom:

we thought it was time to replace the iron ASAP (this actually isn't the worst one by any means).

While we've tried to keep improvements to the in character with it's original design, sometimes original materials are just too difficult to work with. We'd considered wooden posts, but the amount of finish labor necessary to give an acceptable appearance was excessive. Also the nature of wood in an Iowa environment isn't desirable: expansion/contraction with temperature and humidity, cracking, wood rot, etc. We eventually settled on steel core/fiberglass exterior posts. They're paintable (I loathe the current trend to make fences, rails, etc out of white pvc), have minimal expansion/contraction, and bear 2500 lbs per post.

Other than finding out a part that had been unsupported since the porch was built was three inches lower than the rest of the porch, and the interesting snaps and pops when I leveled it up, the process went a lot faster than I'd anticipated.

Now we start stripping the remaining paint of the porch trim. I'm guessing this will take a lot longer than installing the new posts.