crumbling, eroding, falling to pieces, falling apart

My man, he likes a project.  Call him crazy, call him handy, or just

call him my man.  Some men like to bike and run--Kyle he likes

to build and fix.  So when the last piece of railing fell of the

porch of our 61 year old house this spring and the steps

continued eroding into little pieces of garden pebbles, we 

looked into pouring new cement.  Prices we heard were high,

anywhere from $1500 to $2000.  

Sigh, 

we didn't have that to spend on steps, so being

the handy man that he is Kyle looked into tiling over

the bad cement for a 10 year fix.  He had seen it done

and thought it might work.  We made our way to 

our favorite tile store (Tile For Less) where they

now know us on a first name basis and even 

feel comfortable enough with us to let a swear

word out (or two.)  We found some rough surfaced

tile that even looked like cement and the price tag

on THIS was closer to $150. 

Labor: Free

We saved ourselves a cool $1200 (or so) dollars.

I forgot how BAD!!!! these steps looked until

today when I pulled up these pictures!

Crumbling, Eroding, Falling to pieces...

(and you thought this post was going 

to be about ME right? ha ha)

Here is our porch remodel.

SERIOUSLY?? Yikes!!!

Quite literally...falling to pieces

bad, bad and just plain bad!

Temporary wood holding up porch roof, important details!

Hard at work

Rain

OR shine!

Making progress

New tile is kind of like "if you give a mouse a cookie...."

(the book) it leads to other things, right?  The old

metal 1950's post that was holding UP the roof over

the porch ALSO fell off (can't wait to see what

else falls off this old house--it AMAZES me sometimes

to think what we paid for a completely broken

down old house to live a good location ("location,

location, location!") in Salt Lake City.

I digress though....where was I?

Things falling apart, ah yes, the post...it fell off too.

Kinda gotta have a post to hold up the roof so Mr. Handy

thought he would build a lovely new one out of wood.

As follows:

New Post

Leveling and making thing straight

Adding some "bulk", some "beef", some "texture"

Caulking and wood fill

OHHHH pretty!

Time for primer and paint

And there it is!!

New steps!

New post!

Sing Hallelujah! 

Can you see how this is leading to painting the

old trim white that is now old and tan and peeling?

And can you see the samples of gray

paint on the house?

UH-HUH!

If you give a mouse a cookie...

or in my case if you give my man some tile...

Thank goodness he's CHEAP!

Next on the agenda, scraping and painting the all old trim a 

new shiny white.  Kyle plans on hand painting the brick to 

bring orange 1950's brick up to the 2012's.  

No offense to any who love old orange brick--our house

is just ready for a change.  We think we've settled on a 

color, and it will probably take all summer to finish this--but we

have NOTHING but time on our hands~