The Side Porch

It's been a while since I told you about the side porch progress. Early in November the carpenters were back, and they made rapid progress on getting the side porch underway.

Let's see, in August this is where they left off:

Then there was a pause while they went off to work on other jobs -- part of the arrangement was that they would be able to pull off this job and do other work as needed, since the side porch is not mission critical. Actually, it was convenient to not have them working here while we were moving and clearing out stuff.

In early November they showed up and made rapid progress on the screen windows, and soon we had the shape of the trim coming together. Juan showed me this sample he made of a copy of the carved pieces on the front porch and front windows, and I thought it looked great.

So he made more of them.

You can also see he's been installing the reeds on the pilasters between the windows (for those not versed in architectural parts, a pilaster is a suggested column applied to a wall, rather than an actual structural column).

We had a little incident where a cat from the neighborhood was coming on the side porch to tease the inside cats through the bottom of the side door (insert your eyerolls here: the inside cats were literally throwing themselves at the door and losing fur over this), so we put a metal panel over the bottom of the door (which will eventually have screen in it to keep out evil neighborhood cats) and we have cat peace now.

This week they will probably work on the handrail and stairs, which is exciting. I need to get some hardware to hold the screens in place and screen kits for all the windows.

I'm also getting a quote from the painters to paint the side porch and finish the outside painting, which means we are probably going to have the wettest winter on record this year. Consider this my latest blood sacrifice for the good of California.

posted by ayse on 12/09/19