Whose house is this?

It looks like a whole new house!

Ours! Goodbye old porch.

With the end of the summer, we are working hard on getting this last bit of awfulness gone.  I look at this old picture and cringe!  Wow that looked bad. Last summer we had a contractor redo the cement footing.  This summer we had Ballard Ornamental Ironworks make something custom for the porch.  It was installed while we on the cruise! 

It took us a while to decide on the final panel and railing design but I'm really happy with the tulip motif I came up with as a happy compromise.  We wanted something a bit different yet simple and which would work with our old house. Ballard Ironworks was very easy to work with in this regard. They came in took measurements and let us know what we needed to do for code.  I gave some sample sketches and voila! We've gotten complements from neighbors all up and down our street. The final boards which were missing from the underside of the porch roof are up today.  Final caulking, nail set/filling and then final painting still needs to happen.  My plan is to have this DONE by mid-October.   I've started a bit of work with re-grading around the porch and plantings can't happen until that is decided. 

We are still missing one piece of siding on the back of the house.  Other than that our decade-long redo of the exterior of the our old house is done.  It is probably time to paint it again!