Porch Makeover Progress (Plus, Two More Projects Added To The List)

With the remaining time I had left yesterday, I decided to tackle the porch boards. A few weeks ago, I had seriously considered completely redoing this porch and swapping them out for a composite material like Trex. But for now, I’ve decided to sand and paint them. The fact is that while these boards were looking really rough and pretty ugly at the moment, they’re cedar. And cedar is a pretty tough, weather-resistant wood.

And while it doesn’t cost as much as a product like Trex, it wasn’t cheap. What made the porch look so bad isn’t that the boards were rotting and falling apart. It’s that the last finish I used was wearing off and looking very patchy and worn.

Even the areas on the edges, where it looks the absolute worst, was just the previous stain wearing off. the boards themselves are still in great condition.

So, seeing that I have so many other projects that I want to do, and so many other things I want to spend my money on, I decided that tearing up a perfectly good cedar porch and replacing it with Trex really isn’t the best use of my time and money. Instead, I took a couple of hours to sand the boards down using 80-grit sanding discs on my handheld rotary sander.

Once that old stain was sanded off, the boards looked great.

In fact, they looked so good that I had a moment where I struggled with the idea of painting them.

But after going back over the pros and cons of painting vs. re-staining the boards, I’ve decided to keep with my original idea of painting them. I do love the natural wood look of the boards. I love the wood grain and the knots that give it that natural wood appearance. And when it’s painted, I’ll lose all of that. The porch will be one solid, dark brown color.

But I also know that if I re-stain it, I’ll be back out here in a year or two re-sanding and re-staining/sealing this front porch all over again. And then I’ll have to repeat that again, and again, and again, every year or two, if I want to keep it looking nice. I’d like something that is much lower maintenance, and I have high hopes that the Behr Porch & Patio Paint will give me a much longer lasting finish.

While I was working on this and going up and down the steps, I realized that if I’m going to paint the porch, I’ll also need to paint the stained wood portion of the handrails. And while I was inspecting the handrails, I noticed that I have a loose handrail.

The post is secure, but this one area where the handrail attaches to the post isn’t secure. It shifts about 1/4-inch every time I grab it. Since this is a safety issue, this will need to be repaired sooner rather than later.

And since I’ll be redoing that with PVC boards, I thought that maybe I should go ahead and replace these rotting boards on the columns with PVC boards as well.

Yes, I could repair them and paint them for now, but why keep kicking this can down the road when I know it needs to be done. The wood on all three columns is rotting, and since I’m in “front porch makeover” mode right now, I may as well go ahead and replace these. It may extend the time I need on these projects by two or three days, but at least it will be done for good, and I won’t have to waste time repairing this right now only to have to come back to this project in the future.

Plus, it’ll look so much nicer if it’s all done properly, and it’s all done at the same time.