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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:

porch steps before
The painted finish to the porch steps was failing in places.
peeling paint on skirting board
The skirting board was also peeling
crumbling paintwork
There were places on the ceiling where the paintwork needed repair
knots in wood showing through
and there were places where the knots in the wood were showing through the paint
stained mat before repair
The coir mat at the entrance was stained from water damage.
Just a few small peeling patched on the walls…er, or so we thought!

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:

paint peeling

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.

wall repainted
.. and didn’t he do a good job?

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

window frame rot
Aagh!

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!

Nick cleans the windows
Meanwhile the windows needed a thorough clean…

window cleaning

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…

The finished steps

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.

finished porch

 


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