Why redo a perfectly good porch deck? Well, it all started with a leak in the master bathroom during the installation of our new septic system. The leak was under the floor, which has no access other than to crawl under our master bedroom about 20 feet through a tiny opening in the cellar. The crawlspace is about 18” high, dark dirty, and has several 5 to 6 foot long black snakes in residence. No thank you. I’ll cut a hole in the floor instead.
After gaining access to the underbelly of our master bath a clog and a leak were found in the sewer line. Perfect, we’ll replace that along with the septic. It’s already dug up. You may have seen the post on this earlier.
What does this have to do with the porch? Well, since the master bath was down we began using the upstairs bathroom, which started acting up too. Turns out, there was a partial clog of the sewer line there too. Old clay pipes and aggressive tree roots are not a winning combination. The upstairs sewer line passes under the porch so… in order to have it replaced as well, since we’re replacing everything else right now… I dug a hole in our porch to get to the pipe. I did this to save labor costs in the already expensive septic replacement. This was the result.
Actually, this was taken after the new line was put in but you get the idea.
Along with the septic replacement we planned to have a couple places around our foundation shored up. Since we would be pouring concrete we figured we would fix the porch at the same time. See how these projects have a life of their own and expand. Under the porch was a small mystery room. No one knows what it was used for but we are going to use it for storage, possibly a wine cellar if the temp/humidity are acceptable. To that end we decided to give it a concrete floor.
next.
From there it was a simple matter of relaying the stone and finishing it off. I say “simple” because we hired Cochran Masonry to do this work. They did all the concrete work. “Simple” does NOT mean “easy”. But the guys got it done in a couple days, with a couple more to point it and clean everything up.
You would never know it was replaced if you hadn’t seen it torn up (or read this blog post). I imagine it looks as good now as the day it was done by Vali’s grandfather.
Now that the base is finished it’s time to tackle the sagging ceiling and fix a couple rotten beams in the porch roof. Stay tuned.