Or what a way to spend a week of vacation…
You may recall that some months ago we purchased some reclaimed Douglas Fir porch posts. The posts, which we had milled at a full 6 x 6 were to be used to replace the rather scrawny 4 x 4 posts (see the picture to the right) that we had holding up the roof. We’d played with a couple of ideas to expand the girth of the existing posts, including wrapping the 4 x 4s in a cedar taper, but in the end it was true 6 x 6 posts that really felt right.
Saturday I began a week’s vacation and started working on the porch to replace the posts. Even though I’d thought about this for quite some time, Saturday was spent figuring out how I wanted the posts aligned and determining which posts would go where on the porch. The latter was a larger project than I initially expected it to be.
If you’ve ever used reclaimed lumber you’re aware that, in most cases, it’s used, and therefore, imperfect wood. Our wood, which came from supports in some large factory building, was beautiful, but it also had some large checks and there were portions of it that had once had dozens of nails in it. All the nails had been removed during the re-milling process but the holes remained and in some cases, where they would had been exposed to water, there were black rust stains around the holes. While this added to the character of the wood, it wasn’t this character that we wanted heavily emphasized when you stepped onto the porch. So, I had to spend a great deal of time selecting each post and pinpoint where and how it would be placed on the porch.
Once the selection was complete it was just a matter of measuring cutting and replacing the existing posts and then adding two extra posts to each corner. All told the process took about 12 hoursâ€â€Colin helping me along the wayâ€â€and the end result is, I think, stupendous. At the end Kathy thought, and I agreed, that we should add one more post near the entrance to enhance the feel of entering the house. So we used one extra post and put it into place.
Overall, it was an excellent project. Too bad it took me 8 1/2 months to get it done.
