The Front Porch

So after a long 8 month process, the front porch has finally been completed. It seems like just yesterday when I go the call at work that my wife had taken a nasty spill on the cracked up front steps and banged her face all to hell. Thankfully her beauty overwhelmed the superficial damage and she made a full recovery. Shortly thereafter, the mailman Brad stopped me and let me know that he almost busted it on the same step. Now we have a MAJOR problem. If a government employee would have become injured on my property, I was sure that there would have been some negative repercussions…so plans for the new porch began. At the end of April 2008 we gathered a group of dedicated volunteers to completely demo the entire porch including the eroded steps. Since my background is in commercial construction we were going to do this thing right…just in case I needed to land a helicopter on my front porch. After a long day, the porch was gone and in the dumpster, but the digging continued. Rittmeyer and I burned through a few 5 hour energy shots and completed the hand dug footing. The next weekend another smaller group of volunteers showed up to help slam a yard and a half of concrete into the footing trench. I needed to get the walls up fast so any rainstorm would not set me back (by covering up the concrete footing), so I borrowed all the Symons forms from my secret source and spent the next 10 days banging them all together. The end result was an 8” thick, 3’high wall that would support the 6” slab of concrete you would eventually walk on. The following weekend more volunteers helped push, pull, spill, walk, run, the concrete up this makeshift ramp and into the forms. The wall hardened over the next week while I planned and obtained material for the best part, the slab and steps. All of the slab forms went up with no problems because I would take pictures of the progress to work and have the carpenters give their opinions on how best to continue. Now the first part of July, it was time to schedule a concrete finisher, order the last truck of concrete, and beg my volunteers for one last hoorah. Thankfully everyone came through and the day ended with Big Sis learning how to finish concrete. She actually had first learned how step in it (an attribute she learned from me) and Reuben then calmly gave here the tools and told her to fix it, which she did as good as any 3 year old could finish concrete.
The final step to the porch was an architectural wall of brick that would surround the porch and cover the unsightly concrete wall while leaving the finished slab edge exposed. It took many months to finally get all the materials to make this happen. I guess the lag can be attributed to: other projects that needed to be attended to, money, & resources. Anyway, with the expert help of brick and stone mason extraordinaire Robert, all the brick is in. It has been a great experience and a great “curb appeal” improvement to house. A personal thank you is in order to all of our friends, family and community for getting us through this project...I'm on to the back patio next summer! jm