This Is What A $40,000 Porch Restoration Looks Like.

Hello, welcome to Farm Craft. This is my farm, it was built in 1850. I have worked on

this

house for more hours than I care to think about and now we are looking at my next project. This front

porch

has needed my attention. for quite some time now, in fact, it's a little bit delayed and I finally finally have the time to do it and let's get into

this

. Here you can see a front view of the house and the dilapidated

porch

, it's a bit embarrassing. Let's fix everything you knew. I needed to work on it, so we basically stopped maintenance because I need to tear it apart.

Let me show you

what

's happening. These trim boards are in terrible condition and will all need to be replaced underneath. You have a large wood frame structure and much of it is still in good condition. Most of this practically this entire house is built apart from pine, so I think that's

what

it is too, but not all of the structure is visible. Well, from this side of the porch, it actually

looks

to be in pretty good shape and I don't think we're going to need to do much here under the structure, but this floor is in bad shape, the entire floor needs to be replaced, can't you see? good?

Wow, that's thick paint. Now we are at the other end of the porch and when you look at the lower structure you can see that this beam has completely rotted away, this is actually what is supporting the weight. I took that structure out right here, this beam would fall and you can see that's what's holding the beams up. Porch structures are more complex than you think. It would be easier to build it as a deck and take the supports out of the house. That way the beams would be at 90 degrees to what you're seeing here. The problem is that when you do that, if the joists went this way, the tongue-and-groove floor would have to go this way and that's not going to shed water almost too and you'll have a lot of joints because you'd have stretches of floor that would span the entire length. of the porch.

You have just one solid board here, so there are no joints like the two end-to-end joints of the floorboards. Things I need to interrupt with a very quick one. I know what you're thinking. Forty thousand dollars, it seems crazy. I thought exactly the same thing, but after doing this project spending all the hours, it was a lot more work than it seemed. it would be at the beginning, so watch the video, maybe at the end you will agree. The other thing I wanted to tell you is that this video is sponsored by mango power. We are going to look at an E-handle power station, one of the largest portable ones. power plants that are on the market right now, more on that later, I'll go over there and see what we have as far as an arm underneath, so first I need to set up a temporary support system for the porch and I want to make sure that it's going to work before doing so.

I don't know if you guys have the perspective here. This is a giant box that

looks

structural to me, so if I put a support in and it goes under it, then that's going to support the porch. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to find this area here on the sides was hollow and the only beam there really was was right in the center because that would be a problem for the path. I'm trying to hold it, but this is going to work fine. I want to go out, so let's mark our bird mouth.

This is the cutout that fits against the beam at the top of these brackets. Mine are 11 degrees, that's how far away. From the base of the porch I have chosen to place the beams for the part that will go up the beam. I go in an inch and square it. It would be easier to have a flat square, but I don't do that. I feel like going and looking for my frame square, there you go, I wish you thanks and there you have it, a little bird's nest there, so here we are with everything ripped out and I'm quite disappointed because it's in a much worse state than I expected .

This beam here, when you looked at it from below, it looked like it was fine, but look from above, it's a total disaster and the same thing with this beam here, that thing can't be salvaged and when it still had the front trim on you. You know, and you looked at it from below, it seemed like it was okay, let me show you the other side. See, that hidden side underneath looked pretty good. I need a moment to think about this, let's do something else, so he approached me. Many companies wanted me to review their portable power station and I turned them all down until mango power contacted me on their mango e-power power station.

Why, because this is a real tool and it's really versatile, it's a big unit and it's rated at 3,000 watts of continuous power, it has 3.5 kilowatt hours of battery reserve, that's a lot, enough for power any 120 volt appliance you have, but where this really shines is in its versatility, it's a modular system, so you can add extra batteries to it and you can plug it in. two of these together, then you have six thousand watts of continuous output, seven kilowatt hours of storage and the best part is that the two can work together to generate 240 split phase power, which is the North American electrical standard, so If you have a home in North America, two of these together can produce the power you need for your home, meaning it can also act as a battery backup system for your home.

If you expand it to additional batteries, you'll get up to 14 kilowatt hours of storage, which is on par with a Tesla. power powerwall sent me a unit to test and I ran it through its beats. I'm happy to say it lived up to its claims, in fact I was able to get 3700 watts of continuous power out of this even though it's only rated for three thousand and it did well, without any problems, it has a five year warranty, it uses lithium iron phosphate battery chemistry which is the safest chemistry out there right now it also has an app so you can control and monitor it from your phone you can charge it from the grid you can charge it with solar panels you can even charge it from an EV charging station lots of versatility with this unit if you are looking for a portable power station or home battery backup system You should really check out mango e-power.

Their Black Friday sale is from the 24th to the 30th and I'll leave links in the description. Look at them. Let's get back to work in Houston. We have a problem, so this is much worse than me. I expected and it actually took me a couple of days to accept what has to happen here. I was expecting to break this, find a couple of beams that needed replacing, like I knew one was going to need replacing and I thought a Joyster 2 would need to be repaired, but this all needs to come out, this all needs to be replaced.

Maybe I could save this on this and it would last a while, but if I'm going to start replacing things I don't want. This thing has to be new and in good condition and then deteriorate in 20 or 30 years and needs to be replaced, so everything has to turn out like shit. It was at this point that I consulted my brother, he is a home renovation contractor. and he told me that this job would be a forty thousand dollar job even knowing that he had to replace almost everything. He was still skeptical, I mean, 40 thousand dollars, no, that's a lot of damage.

This entire porch is assembled with mortise and tenon joinery. The spikes. They are easy, you just cut them with a hand saw, you have to cut the mortises with a chisel. I imagine all the guys here in 1850 with all their foreign hand tools. I have to say it was a little intimidating to take the weight off of them. from The Columns and put it on my temporary supports. I've never done this before, so there's always that little nagging doubt that something is going to go wrong. The foreigners need to be replaced after 170 years. I don't know, so some might wonder why I'm just leaving these columns hanging, if I completely take them apart up there, it will be difficult for me to put them back in their proper position, so what I did was tie them on both sides with some straps just to keep them there.

Until I rebuild the porch, it will be a bit of a pain to dig the holes for the pillars, but I think overall this will be a time saver rather than trying to get them out from outside, of course, it fell on a rock, that's what that under there, so I leveled down from the columns and marked basically the outside of the two columns, so my partner will focus on that and then my base will be about six inches wider all the way around, that's what I have to dig It's actually the hole I was digging when my backhoe cylinder blew the seal and started spewing hydraulic fluid everywhere, leading me to my first hydraulic cylinder video.

I'll leave a link. There was no foundation under the original docks they simply dug until they hit good solid dirt and then started laying a combination of stone and brick until they reached ground level at a height higher than my foundation. I know what I want it to be, but how do I position it correctly? This is a Transit, a person looks. Through there, look at the sight, look at the numbers on my stick and you know, as it moves up and down, they can tell you, well, that's like 3.1 feet, so what I have now in my hole They are reinforcing bars that I inserted to the exact depth. that I want the base, so that's going to be the top of the base there and there you do it on each base, so that even if the depth of the hole is a little bit different, the top of those rebar is on a single flat and everything is the same.

So let's look at this one. I dug too deep and am putting rocks in there to pick up some of the concrete. I'm going to do that on some of these, all we have to do is bring the concrete up to the top of that rebar and now we're going to be at the right depth. I'm not a specific guy. If you came here to ask for expert advice on pouring footings, you're in the wrong place, let's see how it goes. I consulted an engineer who said I didn't need to put reinforcement on these bases, you know this porch only supports the floor and roof, there just isn't that much weight and these bases are quite thick, they are going to support the weight very well. but it's flat and you can put bricks on it and everything will be underground so I'm not going to see it so here you go and there I can see the top sticking out a little better to be a hair lower than it is high. because the mason can put in an extra, what is that eighth of an inch of mortar? um my other stops are here and I think I'm pretty sure it doesn't go up high if it goes up, it's a lot more trouble for the eternity of the Freemasons, thank you.

All of you here are my mates and you look great, you can see there on the money and that's it, we're finally ready to start building something, although we already built the docks, but you know what I mean, oh wait, I was. wrong, I understand the filler, yes this is treated wood. I have real material. This is 2.5 CCA chromated copper arsenate, something like that. This is the material they used to use on wood all the time, but apparently there were some health risks. You'll see me wearing a mask when I cut it, by the way, all the wood for the frame of this porch cost about twelve hundred foreign dollars for this, but you'll wonder why I didn't use White Oak for These are several reasons why oak white is heavy, it's difficult, it would be much harder to work with, it would be harder to nail the floor when you get to that point and I would have had to wait a long time for it to dry, I remember I was not planning on having to replace this entire external structure external external of this beam that slopes down to intersect with the point furthest from this, in other words, this beam will be up a little bit so that it is a straight line that just continues to the edge and once you have it in position it will I'll screw it in place, but then I'll make some Osage shims that won't rot and will fit perfectly here so this beam will be held tight all the way to the edge of the dock, enough talking for you now inside.

I have this piece of angle iron, I just drilled some holes in it and I'm going to use it as a 90 degree tie down there. you go abroad I used to work putting together houses. Have I ever wondered why if you see a skilled person with a circular saw they don't start here and come in because even if you use this guide and you align the blade correctly, you're going to be a little bit off, you're going to be that way. way, you're going to be that way and this big flat blade doesn't like to spin so that's why you often see people cutting like that so I'm lining up. this guide here with the line to put it in the right place and then I'm aligning the sheet itself, so I'm lining up two points that guarantee that I'm going to be straight foreign foreign, so there's the structure.

Done now I just need a floor which I am going to make myself mainly because I am a glutton for punishment and this led me to my video on how to make tongue and groove flooring from a fallen tree. I'll leave a link, okay, first board. It doesn't have a slot just a foreign foreign language my old back doesn't like this so I have measurements that I have like every five feet along the length of the porch to keep me square because you're going to come out as you go down. If you don't check it out and that's why I'm putting these shims here just to space this out.end a little more than that end, they are called L-cleats, they hold very well, they are stainless steel and the L acts as the head of the nail.

So this flooring nailer is just a pneumatic nailer, it nails it at a 45 degree angle right there, so you put the right depth on it so it lands, you know, right in the corner where the tongue meets the board, like that foreign foreign foreign this. I did not forget it. I want to check and see how close I am. so I'm right at four inches there and a 16 less there, so I still need to keep shiming that side keeping this side tight. I didn't actually shim this exact board because I don't want to shim all the boards I want. of mixing it strangely to make sure it doesn't have a big arc, but it doesn't, these floor hammers are really something else, this material, which I assume is a hard rubber, is flexible and dense enough that you can hit it well . on the tongue and it will bend and it won't make your tongue break and you won't ruin the board.

You can hit it pretty hard with this and not mess anything up now if you really have to hit it hard, that's what I have this piece of scrap because I put it over the tab of the board I'm working on and hit it if I really have to hit it, but you can see that even this I haven't messed up even though I have done it. I really hammered this thing and here you can see what the nails look like, it's moose lath so each board is nailed, then the slot goes over the tongue and none of the nails are exposed, you end up with a nice weird solid floor , so this The last board here was really bowed and crooked and I really had doubts about whether I was going to use it or not, but now that it's there it looks pretty good 10 years later, so I know it's going to break a lot of people's hearts when I read it.

I put paint on it, so why did I go to all that trouble? Well, this is the wood that I have on my property that is rot resistant, it is white oak. You know, every time you do a carpentry project like this you end up not wanting to paint it, but a lot of these boards, you know, they have worms in them, they're not that good and this is an outside porch, this is going to get dirty, it's going to want you to grow mold and all that kind of stuff, it just ends up. It doesn't look so good, what I really want here is low maintenance and something that will last forever, and linseed oil top paint on this white oak will achieve that, if the offends, sorry, my porch, I'm doing it, thank you all.

Okay, this is our linseed oil painting. This is the base. Actually, linseed oil painting is something that many people are not familiar with. It is linseed oil mixed with an opaque pigment. Linseed oil is a great finish, but it doesn't hold up. to ultraviolet light but with an opaque pigment to protect it, it is a very robust finish that lasts a long time and can always be rejuvenated with another coat. It never peels well. That's where the primer layers go outdoors, so at this point I made the mistake of To think that I was almost done building the column bases and putting the weight back on the columns was a lot of work, which said that the column bases had some new and unique challenges that I needed to solve, and in the end, I did.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. English wow foreigners foreigners these are the feet of the column that goes up here uh this was for one of the half columns but obviously all the main columns have a full square on this so this has a cove cut and then this has a round top. and then the bottom was a solid block of solid heart pine. It lasted a long time, but a solid block like that is just not going to be as stable and I didn't want to do that. I have this Osage, which is one of the most rot resistant woods out there, so I made a box on the bottom.

I put thick sides because here I'm going to have an aluminum shim like 16 inch aluminum, so it's going to have four feet that are going to be a little bit hidden. I'll actually be sitting down, but now the trick is that this box has to be tapered because the floor is tapered and the distance is about a quarter of an inch difference between here and here and obviously if you were to just make a square box and put it over there. You'll have a quarter inch gap somewhere and it just won't look right, so I have to sharpen each box.

One of my round boards goes on top of that Cove board. I'm going to place this. to this centered and this will go inside the column, so once the column is down, the column will not be able to move and you know this Osage will never rot. They have used this for fence posts that have been in the ground for over 100 years and are still solid, you know, it's probably in a dry climate, but either way, even painted, these things will easily outlast me. I will never deal with this again. There's a lot of Osage there, let's put it through the planer.

I wonder where I got this from. I used to live in West Virginia. These things grew like weeds on our property. I turned them into boards at my sawmill. Thank you. I can't believe how long it takes to put these columns back into the bases. That's several full days of work. here and I still have two columns missing, each column is different, each base has to be made to measure, the heights vary a little and yes, I have had to like patching the base of a couple of columns, this significantly, let's see From there on down it's all new and then here and then the same thing on the other side, so I'm going to take you with me to the last two and show you what I'm doing now.

They both need to go down and be rebuilt once you take them down. I'll show you why this is what the bottom looks like. I mean, that's just not going to hold any weight. There's almost nothing left now. The thing is just a few inches above. It's solid wood, so it's not that bad. I don't have to replace the entire column. You know I would if it weren't for all this detailed work here. This would take a long time and I can't just take the column apart because of this. Then what do I do? What I'm going to do is open it up at the bottom here fix these boards and then I'll make new boards and put them back together, you see, okay, that didn't really happen, but that's what it feels like to work on this porch.

For so long, working at home is not what I like to do most. I'd rather be wrestling with an eight-inch hydraulic cylinder right now. I always appreciate something when I do it because this house was built in 1850, these guys on the place didn't have electricity, they didn't have power tools, they used planes and hand saws, hammers and chisels, and you know, they made all of this pretty amazing, now They didn't drill, they saw the wood, there are a lot of places where you can see the rough cut wood and you can see that it was cut with a big circular saw blade, so they had a water or mule powered sawmill somewhere around here that was cutting the outside bumper so for each board I clamp and pre-drill and then dry fit with screws and then once I have it positioned how I want I can take it back down and glue it on.

If you try to glue it and screw it all in one, you can get away with it. Usually, but sometimes it will change and you will end up out of place. Well, that was quick, not strange. What I'm getting here is five and one eighth here and five and a quarter here so at this distance I have a decrease of one eighth of an inch one eighth of an inch is about three millimeters yeah I need to build my base to accommodate that thank you , here is my reduction jig and it is set to just over one degree which should give me the amount of reduction I need. here, thanks, it's actually going to sit on these aluminum feet that are behind the edge so they won't be visible and what that does is give it some air space because water is going to get under this thing and you want that The water will get out and air will get in and dry it out, but you don't want too much because then there will be wasps getting up there and you'll have a wasp infested porch.

That's impossible to fix. They really don't need anything more than to hold themselves in position until they put weight on. They use some gravity clamps. So this is the seventh one I've done. You just had to see one. I'll build another one you want. to look at, no you didn't want to see, I just made another one, but for me this is the last one, which feels amazing and I know what you're thinking now, how can I put that underneath that's higher than the column? Now here's the trick, so now the jack is all set up on a piece of plywood that will distribute the weight so the jack doesn't ruin the floor, so now I can push it against the joist up there and I can lift. this column up just a little bit.

I don't need to lift it that much. I've got that piece up there and you can see I only need to lift it up about maybe an eighth of an inch. Foreigner Foreigner Foreigner and we're back. on the columns it hasn't fallen off yet, I'm not sure what happened here, but look at this edge here that's about half an inch when I put these beams here, I was trying to line them up with the outside, something must have moved at some point. period, I don't think the column moved, I think the wood was wet and might have shrunk a little, but it didn't shrink that much, so there's one of them, now look at this one, this one is perfect, that's what it was doing. because I need to put a piece of molding here that's going to stick out, you know, about an inch down over the brick, go to one of the others and you can see this one that's just a little bit but it's not perfect.

So using the string I was able to determine how much I needed to pat each spot and I cut a bunch of wedges to match and once I covered them you'll never know they were underneath, don't tell anyone my favorite thing in the world to do in the foreigner yes, at some point in the near future I will build a new set of stairs for this porch, but not now. I need a break from the porch, what better than to get all this putty out of the way. than throwing away a foreign bearing, thanks foreign guys, there's obviously more to do, but I'm ending the video here because the porch is practically finished, there's a little bit of painting, caulking and stuff like that, but you don't want to see. that and uh man, I'm glad I finished this project.

I was skeptical when I started, that this was really such a big project where my brother told me the quote, man, I'm totally porch, I need to build new stairs, those stairs look terrible. Now when you live in an old house like this it's never finished it's a matter of getting to the point where you're happy enough with it and then working on it later and that's what we're going to do with this so I hope you enjoyed the video thanks for watching see you next time thanks foreigner foreigner