Progress on the Porch

I never quite  know what to call the structure that we are building.  In Florida, it would be a "lanai."  Here in Wisconsin, it really is a screened-in patio slab.  I call it a "porch" for convenience, but in reality, a porch has a wooden floor and a shingled roof.  Ah well, whatever it is that we are building, the work continues even as it tries to kill us.

Why the fatalistic viewpoint?  Well, we work each day in pain (Rick has more pain than do I), and we work past our limits to the point of exhaustion.  Add in the heat, sunburn, and a constant threat of dehydration no matter how much we try to drink, and you start to get the picture.

We have worked nine to ten hour days for the last few days just trying to get the porch finished.  We leave on Sunday again for a week at Mayo as Rick undergoes more tests and tolerates some diagnostic injections. We hope that they will be able to discover what kind of physical therapy he can use to alleviate his Piriformis / sciatica pain.  He also will find out soon if he needs back surgery.  Before we leave, we both desperately want to put on the roof.

To get to that point, since my last blog, we have done the following steps on the porch:

We completed the cross braces on the roof frame.

We added fascia boards to the rafter tails
from the house to build a frame for the soffits.

We used treated lumber to frame in the north wall
of the porch.

We replaced rotting 2x4s with a 4x4 treated post to frame in
the opening for the door.  Then we completed the frame of the
east-facing wall.  We also took all of the timber that we tore out
to the city landfill.

Yesterday we spent the day framing in the soffits.
Today, Rick added the final bracing brackets to support
the roof we will try to install tomorrow.

The new roof structure has braces every 24 inches which should better
support the heavy snow loads we seem to be getting each winter.

And each day as we build, I move my bean plants and
my cherry tomato plant out of the way so they continue
to grow.  I can almost taste the fresh veggies already!

While the porch still is not complete, each day we DO cross off more items on our "to do" list.  Eventually, we will complete the porch, even if it takes the entire summer.