“I bought a heavy-duty crowbar and heavy gloves and began to rip up the creaky old tongue-and-groove,” Allan says. Next thing I knew, I had a growing pile of splintered trash in the side yard. I had the foresight to remove all the nails from the boards before I threw them on the pile.
I was thinking of myself, primarily, and how a punctured palm could ruin a whole day. Only then did I think ahead to the safety of whoever would remove the pile of trash from my side yard.” He had to bribe the city trash men to take the mess away.
At one point, Allan decided that the work was beyond him and hired a contractor recommended by neighbors who used per diem laborers. They removed the rotten columns and easily put the new ones in place.
All that remained was stripping 80 years of paint before repainting. The day laborer hired for the job started into stripping with a heat gun. While Allan’s wife was on an errand, a spark from the heat gun started a fire that quickly spread to the interior of the porch. The laborer high-tailed it to parts unknown, stopping briefly at the nearby fire station to report the blaze.
“The good news is they saved my house,” Allan said. “The bad news is it took me another month and several hundred dollars to repair the damage they did to the porch roof. That repair project was one I did myself.”
The lesson Allan learned from his Victorian-porch fiasco is simple, and you can see it in the front porch on his present home. The porch is all of 20 square feet. It has no roof. And every inch of it is concrete.
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