Hall porch redecoration

Our hall porch is a lovely Victorian ‘conservatory’ construction, but it does have an issue with a hard-to-reach section of the roof in which gathers rainwater, weeds and once even a dead seagull. Although we had the porch professionally redecorated a few years ago, this last winter we had noticed quite a bit of damage building up due to rain ingress: peeling paintwork most noticeably.

We share the costs of maintaining the building with our neighbours and we divide up any tasks that we can do ourselves. Nick and I volunteered to redecorate the hall porch. I took a few ‘before’ photos:

Once I start with the scraper, I find it hard to stop, and as I went at the wall I found more and more paint coming off very easily:

The problem here was that it was coming off in several layers, including patches of lining paper. So Nick had to repaper this section before we could replaint.

Once we went up the ladder we started to discover other issues, such as this section of rotten frame where water had got in…

I tackled this with several layers of wood filler.  I can’t say I made a beautiful job of it but it should hold for a few years I hope!

This looks like Nick did all the work but I did a lot of scraping, filling and painting I can assure you! Although I did leave the painting of the steps to him, I admit.

It look a few weeks of off-and-on work but it was worth it…

We replaced the coir mat with a faux-coir version (easier to vacuum and generally keep clean) and treated the top of the steps to a new washable mat from Dunelm.