Once we’d lifted the back of the house enough to keep a pencil dropped in the dining room from making its way thirty feet into the kitchen, it was time to look for new worlds to conquer. Stuff to fix. That’s easy. If our house was a map of the world, it would show a tiny island in the middle, where we set up shop and lived inside the shell of the house, and “Here Be Monsters” all around it, right to the edge where your bank account falls off if you sail that far.

So there was any number of things we should tackle, but we had to choose based on what we could afford, which was not much, and what was most likely to fall on our heads. We figured we had all this leftover lumber and screw jacks and so forth, we might as well keep going, and jack up the front porch while we were at it. Here’s what it looked like when we moved in.

Hmm. Not good. And I can assure you, there’s a lot more not goodness than you can see in the picture. The porch had been slumping for decades, just like the back of the house, and the side of the house, and the top of the house, and the inside of the house, and my courage. The occupants had tried various stratagems to deal with the slumping, all ineffective, or making things worse, take your pick. They also did very foolish things like storing firewood filled with carpenter ants on the porch, and leaning canoes and other detritus against the rotting kneewalls, which began to tip over. Some of the decking was rotted away, so they nailed sheets of plywood over it instead of fixing anything and kept going.

That roof was going to be a substantial problem. As the porch slumped, it pulled the metal roofing down and away from the house. This opened up all the seams, which allowed rain and snow and other bad juju to get in, and rot everything  further. It doesn’t look it in the photo, but if we didn’t fix the porch soon, it might pull right off the front of the house. It would be impossible for us to rebuild it, simply due to the cost, never mind the amount of work it would entail. So we must save it if we can. But it’s curved. We had a rule of thumb in the construction business, back in the day. If there’s a curved line anywhere on the plans, you multiply the estimate by 2. There’s a reason why houses are rectangles.

This is the eave of the porch, over on the left of the first picture.

I don’t know how the bank had the nerve to claim they owned this house, and the audacity to sell it to us. It’s obvious even to the layman that squirrels owned the house, and should have been added to the deed. But that’s what a leaky roof gets you. The wood gets punky, the squirrels find a soft spot, and pretty soon they’re moving in furniture and in-laws and nuts by the bushel barrel. Day 1, standing up to my shins in snow, I covered that hole up, and several others like it. Like this:

The next time someone calls me a regular Norm Abram in the comments, I’m going to re-run that picture. It was quick and dirty, but it got the job done, mostly. The squirrels got really angry, and tried tearing their way through that patch. Eventually I had to build a shelf under it and cover it with rat traps to kill the little bastards and gently corral our bushy tailed friends in Hav A Heart traps and transport them to a farm out in the country where they could run free.

The former denizens saw the concrete step, and figured concrete is infinitely strong, so let’s plop the weight of the roof and the porch on it.

The two large columns aren’t original equipment. The porch was originally a little forest of shorter columns that sat on the kneewall, but the kneewall sagged, started to tip over, the columns started to fall out, and when the porch roof sagged enough, they bought two tall columns at a flea market or something and put them in the opening, sitting on a beam they made that was sitting on the step.

Porches really don’t weigh very much in the scheme of things, but they weigh something. They especially weigh something with three or four feet of snow on top of them, which happens every year here. The steps started to tilt backwards under the weight, and the porch kept sinking.

All that shifting around and leaks and carpenter ants and rodent excavations left the kneewall mostly just a suggestion of a structure, not really doing much, and it completely disappeared on the interior side:

The cat used the lumber as a scratching post, and slipped underneath the deck any time he needed a warm-blooded snack. I figured I’d find some sort of druidical pile of rodent skulls down there when we got going. I wasn’t disappointed

I didn’t wait to fix everything before I tried to make the place look presentable. One year in, the front of the house was at least painted smartly. But sooner or later, the porch would have to be fixed for good. I guess it’s sooner, because I’ll show you how we did it.

[To be continued. If you’d like to support Sippican Cottage, recommend it to your online friends, leave a trenchant comment, or a regular one if you prefer, or hit our tip jar if you’re feeling wealthy]