Earlier this week we mentioned that we had done work for Molly, the owner of Buckminster’s Cat Café. Unless you follow us on Instagram you may not have seen the pictures of that job from back in August 2017.
Molly was having a problem with her front porch; the railings were bowing out, you bounced across the deck boards as you walked. Once we started pulling up deck boards we realized the porch was in much worse shape than we’d thought.
What we assumed would be securing a few joists and replacing the deck boards turned into replacing them entirely. Nearly all of the joists had completely rotted out and broken away from the nails that should have been holding them in place. The deck was bouncy because it was missing most of its joists; there weren’t more than three left in place supporting the weight of the deck boards.
As it turned out, those posts the railings are secured to aren’t just supporting the railings. Those are eight foot posts that rest on the concrete pad the entire porch was built on. The problem with this is that the garden that surrounds the porch had started pushing against the side of the porch, and as that weight pushed on the walls, it pushed on the railings as well, kicking them out. We had to dig out around the wall in order to push them out. Once we pulled up the deckboards we could get in there and push the walls back out and then add additional supports to tie everything together to keep it from shifting again.
The stairs had been in in pretty bad shape, too. While we had everything ripped apart we rebuilt the stairs entirely, adding a third stringer down the middle that should have been there to begin with.
We wrapped up by repainting the new deckboards the same color as the old ones. At first glance it may look the same as when we arrived, but with the new joists and additional supports throughout to keep the structure squared up and tied together, this rehab should definitely hold up for years to come.
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