Making a Deck More Porch-Like

Many people use the terms deck, porch, and patio interchangeably, though if you have talked to me for more than fifteen minutes, you'll know that I have a tendency to hairsplit definitions. To me, a deck is an uncovered, more casual, recreational space for family use at the back of the house. A porch is a covered space that is on the front entrance of the house. There are of course, variations on this. You can have a porch on the side or back of a house, and Victorian era homes are a like a love letter to porches--stick 'em wherever you like-- have a front porch, a side porch, a kitchen porch, even a sleeping porch. A porch is a more traditional feature of an older home, while decks seem to look more fitting on a house with modern lines. 

Which is why, for more than a decade, I have loathed (I checked, and that is not too strong of a word), the deck on the front of my 1930s-era colonial. Not only do decks not belong on the fronts of houses, any houses (in my admittedly strong opinion), they also don't belong on this age of home. 

I disliked it from the moment I moved in, but the image above is a "before" photo from a few summers ago. What can't be seen from this image is the rickety railing, the warped wood, and the gaps and warps between deck boards that were beginning trip people up. This awful looking thing replaced a proper brick stoop, as you can see in this historical photo from 1942, below, and an even larger version with wrought iron railing that was added later, but not photographed.  

Below is a more recent photo, when we took a stop-gap approach to a stair issue that had become a hazard for our elderly parents. Now we were at the point where the deck was not only ass ugly, it was a potential danger to family members. It was the final motivation to get going on the renovation project, which we began last spring. 

While we did not have the budget or the skills to put up a true covered porch (we likely would have hired an architect and a building contractor for a project of that scale), our goal was to porchify our deck. That's a new word in the DIY lexicon: porchify. You heard it here first. We submitted our plans to our local municipal authority for a building permit. The design itself was pretty simple, traditional, but with certain elements beefed up to give that porch-like feel, and of course chosen to meet the safety requirements of local building codes. We married the elements of several designs we found online into something we felt matched the personality and era of the house. 

In the spring of 2022, Tom started demolition. And as the kids like to say, I was there for it. Nothing better than to see a particularly hated part of your house getting replaced for something better. 

Despite the sad state of the decking and railing, we found that the footings, posts, and joists were in great shape, and well constructed (almost to the point I wondered if they were done at separate times by different people? Hard to say.) Given the price of lumber during the pandemic, we decided to keep these in order to shave a little off the total expense.

Because we aren't home improvement television personalities or social media influencers, I'm not going to pretend this project took a weekend, or two, or even three. Tom was the driving force and mastermind behind this project, but he was not about to give up his summer kayaking or bicycling trips. And then we also had elder parent care, and visits from grandchildren, and yard work and jobs. When he was able to carve out time to work on the project, our front yard looked like this: 

He worked hard to get the stairs and decking in place, so that people could use our front door safely. Then the posts and railing went in as time allowed. 

One thing we did a little differently is that we kept the footprint of the existing deck, but routed the railing around the front window, so that it didn't obstruct it. That created a little ledge off the deck railing that is under the window, which you can sort of see in the photo on the right. Right now our potted trees are there. We might build some sort of planter box or feature in the future, but for now it's just a quirk of building around existing features. The photo is from this summer. 

Construction continued into the fall months because, well, life. It felt a little strange. In our Midwestern "work hard and get it done" culture, spreading projects out incrementally over months seems almost wrong. And while we did want to get it done, our priorities were all over the place last summer, so our efforts were too. It was not a straight line. We had to be okay with that. I think for the most part we were. 

One of the other accomplishments of this project was redesigning the stairs so that there were more of them, with shallower rises, so that our elderly parents could more easily navigate them. Stairs are particularly difficult to get right, and when you don't get it right, even by a hair's breadth, people stumble on them. It's really a credit to his patience and determination that these are well constructed, solid, and easier on old knees. Below is a picture from last September, when we were beginning to get close to the railing finish line. 

By October, Tom had finished the railing, the trim, filling and paint touch-ups that seem never-ending on projects like these. It has been downright glorious to pull up the curb of our home and see the big difference it has made in how our house presents itself to the neighborhood. (Ignoring the fact that we need to mow, and finish painting scraped window trim on the upper story window. Chores are never done!)

Even now, in the summer of 2023, we have one last task to do to finish our porchified front entrance, and that is staining the decking. Pressure treated wood needs to cure a good long time before staining, and we're hoping to get that job done this fall, so we can finally call the project complete. We also have a few other small projects that "accessorize" this one, like the replacement of a shabby and leaning old lamp post. But this was a big, big item to get checked off our list, and we feel really good about it. 

The next steps in the front of the house exterior mostlly have to do with updating parts of the front perennial and landscaping beds, which after a few years need a little tweaking and reviving. That's more in my wheelhouse, and I've already gotten a bit of a start with weeding and moving some plants around. More to come on that, soon.