Front stoop makeover

James completed a major makeover this summer of our front stoop. As with many other areas of the house, the person who flipped our house took numerous shortcuts in the rehabilitation process and focused on making improvements that looked good but were not necessarily sound. We have been in the house since November of 2010 and already the front porch was in bad shape. The floorboards were rotting, the porch floor was listing, and the roof structure was sinking to the point where the storm door could only open so far before it hit the ceiling. The front step leading to the porch had never been painted and wasn't even attached to the porch. The whole structure was ugly and unsafe.

As James worked his way through the project, he discovered that it was in even worse shape than we thought. There were no footings beneath the porch floor and the columns were merely shells - there were no true columns. It is a wonder that the whole structure hadn't already collapsed. James put in footings, shored up the roof structure and installed actual columns inside the decorative sheathing. He replaced the rotting floorboards with Trex composite decking, which looks amazingly like painted wood, and made a step that is secured to the porch. We were even able to get a Trex color that almost exactly matches the house.

Now the front entrance to our house is both attractive and safe. We neglected to take a before photo bur here is how it looks now:

James put the finishing touch on yesterday, the ceramic house numbers from MacKenzie-Childs:

Next up: working on the side porch, aka The Party Porch.