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The thing that bugged me about our porch since the day we bought our house was the wimpy trim.  It wasn't high on my priority list since we were dealing with pink sparkly walls and 1960's plumbing but it bugged me every time I looked at it.

Time to fix that.

We're going with PVC column wraps to cut down on warping and maintenance.  The posts that came with the house are 4.5."  I created paper templates of my 2 standard wrap options (6" and 8").  You can see I took this shot a week or so ago when Kai was still with us and very involved with the porch construction.  Pretend the templates are 1/2" bigger since I screwed that up.  Then pretend that there are additional wraps on the bottom and crown trim at the top to beef it up a bit.  So basically don't look at the picture at all because they're all the wrong sizes. Spoiler alert, we settled on the 6"ers.  I'm still hemming and hawing but that train has left the station so 6" it will be.

The other thing that always bugged me is that the columns were centered on the porch and not on the door. I have no idea why the door isn't centered (it is close and could have been) so hopefully the gable will give it a more obvious place to put the posts.  Also the posts on either end were cut in 1/2 (were they being cheap?) down the middle so there were 1/2 posts on the ends.



We swapped the 3 full posts and 2 1/2 posts with 6 full, beefier posts and moved the interior posts so that the better aligned with the door.  We'll install the white column wraps at the end of the project.

It still looks like a mess but definitely a much more secure mess.

Now that the porch is full secured the next part is (gulp) cutting out the middle section and building a crazy complicated gable that we've never built before.  What could go wrong?