Boats and Chicks

This weekend was all about boats and chicks and porches. We were able to come up on Thursday evening which allowed for a much needed extra day of progress. Early Friday morning Bagwell Lumber showed up with a delivery of the moldings for the front porch. We didn’t waste any time getting set up and getting started. Oceana got started body working the handrails on the north side of the porch while I started fitting the rails on the south side. We glued and screwed the rails in place and plugged the screw holes with pine plugs.

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Plywood and Trim

After applying felt paper over the OSB, we installed a layer of 3/8 BC plywood to the half walls of the porch. After the plywood, we installed the trim across the bottom of the half walls, across the top of the half walls, and vertically at each post. The north side of the porch was way out of level so we cheated the bottom trim to make it more appealing to the eye. Once the vertical trim was on at each post, we mocked up a few different options for how to proceed. We ended up with the diagonal blocks in each corner. It makes for a lot more pieces to install but it sure looks good.

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No PVC Molding Here

With the 1x moldings installed, we started running the basecap molding inside of the shadow boxes. All of the moldings were back caulked and glued at each joint. Since we’re using wood moldings versus PVC or cement board products, we’re going the extra mile to make sure they don’t rot out on us in the future. I guess I just thought that an 85 year old wood framed house with wood siding originally should have wood siding reinstalled, not plastic or fiber cement.

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Diagonal Bracing

With the paneling complete on the porch, we looked at adding some decoration to the posts. I mocked up a few diagonal braces at the upper corners where the posts met the beams and we liked how they tied in with the paneling below. While I was installing the diagonal braces, Oceana caulked in all of the trim on the porch to prep for primer.

Boat Ride!

Our new friends Bud and Diana offered us a lake tour from a boat so we were happy to oblige! They picked us up at the end of our dock and gave us an awesome social distancing tour of the lake. There is so much history here and it’s great to be able to hear it first hand. It was also nice to be out on a boat again. It was a quick tour but needless to say, we had a blast!

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Priming the porch

With daylight left after the boat ride, we started priming the paneling on the porch. I brushed primer on the moldings while Oceana rolled out the primer on the plywood in the middle of the panels. We primed until we ran out of daylight. At first light Sunday morning we were out finishing up the primer. We got 2 coats onto all of the raw wood and one coat on all of the pre-primed moldings.

Hatching Chickens

This weekend we also had some Easter chicks hatch! We’ve had some chicken eggs in the incubator for 18 days now and they went into lock down on Friday. Lock down is when you raise the humidity in the incubator and you don’t open the lid until they’re all hatched (or some major emergency happens). 3 of the chicks started trying to come out on Saturday but they didn’t make it out until Sunday. Easter chicks! We were able to watch a few of them hatch and then another one hatched on the way home. It’s kind of fun having chicks hatching on the road!

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