• Home
  • about emily
  • before + after
  • HGTV + DIY Network
  • good press
  • contact
  • Let’s Organize These Posts:

    • Art Attack
    • Backyard
    • Barn
    • Basement
    • Bathroom
    • Beach
    • Bedrooms
    • Being Thrifty
    • Business-y
    • Buying and Renting and Selling
    • Casual Celebrations
    • Closets
    • Curb Appeal
    • Dainty Details
    • Deck
    • Decor
    • Dining Room
    • DIY
    • Dog-Related
    • Entryway
    • Flooring
    • For the Kids
    • Garage
    • Gardening
    • Helping The Economy
    • HGTV + DIY Network Projects
    • Holiday-Related Projects
    • Home Safety
    • Kitchen
    • Lighting
    • Living Room
    • Merry Travels
    • Office Space
    • Organized
    • Other Pads
    • Outdoor Living
    • Scooter Fun
    • Stairwell
    • Sunroom
    • Supporting Sponsors
    • The Art Room
    • Tools
    • Uncategorizable
    • Wedding
    • Windows
    • Work-pads
  • Search

  • Hi, I’m Emily

    Emily Fazio

    I'm a home improvement enthusiast, living a very merry DIY lifestyle.

    You can find me writing for HGTV and DIY Network, follow me on facebook and instagram, or drop me a note if you'd like. I love notes.

    Thanks for visiting!

  • BROWSE POSTS BY CATEGORY:

    • Art Attack (7)
    • Backyard (92)
    • Barn (8)
    • Basement (27)
    • Bathroom (43)
    • Beach (13)
    • Bedrooms (73)
    • Being Thrifty (53)
    • Business-y (12)
    • Buying and Renting and Selling (23)
    • Casual Celebrations (36)
    • Closets (17)
    • Curb Appeal (44)
    • Dainty Details (8)
    • Deck (23)
    • Decor (286)
    • Dining Room (37)
    • DIY (577)
    • Dog-Related (24)
    • Entryway (59)
    • Flooring (58)
    • For the Kids (32)
    • Garage (17)
    • Gardening (70)
    • Helping The Economy (30)
    • HGTV + DIY Network Projects (283)
    • Holiday-Related Projects (80)
    • Home Safety (12)
    • Kitchen (83)
    • Lighting (31)
    • Living Room (77)
    • Merry Travels (21)
    • Office Space (21)
    • Organized (41)
    • Other Pads (14)
    • Outdoor Living (12)
    • Scooter Fun (8)
    • Stairwell (20)
    • Sunroom (22)
    • Supporting Sponsors (43)
    • The Art Room (3)
    • Tools (43)
    • Uncategorizable (1)
    • Wedding (28)
    • Windows (14)
    • Work-pads (10)
  • Search

  • Pages

    • blog
    • Merrypad Features
    • Privacy Policy
    • about emily
    • before + after
      • before + after, our current home
      • before + after, our first house
    • contact me
    • choose a badge and share the merrypad.com love
  • Home
  • about emily
  • before + after
  • HGTV + DIY Network
  • good press
  • contact

We DIY’ed Some Front Porch Railings (Finally!)

June 1, 2011

Come on over now, Grandma. Between the handrail that I reinstalled on the inside staircase and the brand-spankin’ new front porch with fancy dual-handrails that is about to be revealed, you’re probably less likely to take a fall on my watch.

It hasn’t been too safe around here for the last 7 months. And I’m kind of a safety nazi. I had gotten someone on Craigslist to successfully disassemble and haul away the old front porch last November; that old porch wasn’t pretty. Facts: It was stained reddish. It was an odd, unflattering shape. Its platform extended beyond the overhang every which way. And it was really ragged out. Remember it? Here’s a refresher.

Before: Old Front Porch

The timing of it’s demise corresponded with the new siding project; I had wanted the contracted crew to install a new header board for the porch and side around that board while they were doing the rest of the house. Neither Pete or I wanted to be responsible for hacking into the perfect siding once it had been installed, so this seemed like a pretty good plan. And yes, it ended up working out in our favor just fine.

Except that it was then November. And I live in Rochester. Which means it gets cold, and not many people want to be using power tools outside in icy conditions, myself included. For a few weeks around Christmas I was certain that my house wasn’t going to have any kind of front porch until springtime, but we did luck out right around New Years, finding ourselves home on a weekend when it happened to be a balmy 60 degrees. I went out and bought lots of lumber for the front porch, and we had a platform and adequate steps built just in time to ring in the first substantial snowstorm of the new year. (You can read that whole process right here and here, if you’re interested). The porch has looked just like this for 5 full months now.

Me. And the front porch. Sans railings and even boards up on the landing, but yes. It's strong and solid and exists. Happy!

And that brings me to current day.

Good ol’ Memorial Day weekend is usually a nice time for some yard work (and I’m forever excited about the hardware store deals this time of year, which is part of the reason I started working on the front garden) but we also had ambitious plans of getting the much-needed railings installed on the front porch. After all, like I was hinting at, the entryway has been lacking safety for months now. Both Pete and I had nearly fallen off in moments of imbalance, and I just couldn’t have Grandma or Grandpa being concerned with falling off the porch on their way in. Plus, it looked bad. And I didn’t want to find myself with some fine for an unsafe structure, you know?

I had already bought 4″x4″ boards for the railing posts, and those spent the winter safely nestled in the garage, but I then spent a lot of time trying to figure out how exactly I wanted to do the actual barrier railing pieces. Similar to the pergola railings, I leaned towards a chunky horizontal presentation for the front porch too; and since you can see one of the pergolas from the road, mimicking those railings seemed like it would look consistent and refreshing all around. I leaned to use the same 1″x6″ boards that come in convenient 8′ lengths right at Home Depot.

You might recall from some of the more recent pictures of the front of my house that I left the front porch floor boards un-trimmed to length; this is because they’re pressure treated, and based on my experience with the back deck, I knew that the boards would shrink a little bit in width and length, which they did after having the 5 months to settle into place, so we snapped a chalk line and trimmed the boards to be even; we’re confident that they’ll remain looking this clean-cut for years to come.

And now trimmed evenly. Beautiful!

The posts were the easy part. Wait, did I say that? This ended up being a highly complex project starting with the posts. It made both of us thankful for being reasonably good at the whole trigonometry thing. Angles and measuring and planning was made much easier by our new friend, Mr. Miter Saw, which I rocked out on for hours.

Miter sawing my little heart out. We didn’t actually expect it to be a 7-hour job, but it became that pretty quickly. First thing we realized was that the posts leading down the stairs would need to be angled to accommodate the slanted railing, and that slant needed to be the exact same angle as the stairs, which we deciphered to be about 36-degrees but don’t ask us how we came up with that. Three random techniques from deep within our mathematically-minded brains validated that measure, so we went with it and held our breath. Turns out it worked.

Front porch with new upper hand rails... looking level so far! If I haven’t said it before, I’ll say it again; Pete a level-headed dude and every single board that went up was checked thrice for being level in all directions. This obviously works very well in my favor. I “eyeball” almost everything.

Tricky part numero dos had something to do with realizing that the boards slanting down the stairs needed to be cut at an angle, therefore making the board appear to be 7″ wide instead of 6″. And while it’s still hard for me to grasp exactly what kind of mind games these pressure treated boards were playin’ on me, we had to adjust our game plan a little bit and go with the whole fool-your-eye strategy and cut the slanted boards down to 4-7/8″ wide instead of 6″. Tell me if you can seriously tell that we did some mindful manipulation to the slanted boards when you see the final pictures, OK?

Railings... going in! You can see in these pictures that we modified our install process a little bit from how we installed the railings on the pergolas; this time, each board is affixed to the space in between each post instead of overlapping it and being attached to the exterior of the post. We think this makes for a cleaner overall look. It wasn’t difficult to do either, thanks to Pete’s idea of sistering up some smaller pieces of wood to the posts (perfectly measured to match the railings boards) and letting the rails attach to those. From the outside it looks seamless, and from the inside of the railing it looks like this (not bad at all):

Railing install strategy. Looks sleek from the inside and the outside.

Pete earned bonus points by deciding to cap off the post caps too. He’s been telling me it would be easy to do this around the pergola posts too, and now I believe him. Instead of leaving them exposed like this:

Exposed post caps, soon to be covered.

He encased each of the 6 caps with custom cut boxes to conceal the metal uglies. I like the nice chunkiness of the whole thing too.

Encasing blocks for each of the metal caps. From afar, the house is really starting to come together; I know that I’ve said that before but between the updates with the landscaping this weekend, the new doors, the new siding, and the new front porch, it’s really looking much different from when I moved in. New, new, new.

Updated front porch! Whoop. Next up: weather proofing. It’s due for a nice water sealant in the next few weeks to help the wood keep looking so good. I’m considering staining also, but I might leave that for another year and just enjoy the fresh new wood look for awhile longer.

P.S. My neighbor’s big metallic temporary garage has been there for two years, sad face. I wish very much for it to be gone. Just wanted to you to know I have no say in that.

Share

Curb Appeal  / Deck  / DIY  / Entryway  / Home Safety

Emily
I'm a home improvement enthusiast, living a very merry DIY lifestyle. I've been a freelancer writer for 10+ years and you can find my work on popular home and garden sites, like HGTV.com. Follow me on facebook and instagram, or drop me a note.

14 Comments


Kirsti @ Living in Lovely LaLaLand
June 1, 2011 at 9:18 am
Reply

Looks great! I love the horizontal lines!



    Emily
    June 1, 2011 at 10:02 am

    Thanks Kirsti!

Katrina
June 1, 2011 at 10:24 am
Reply

I laughed at the thought of trying to shovel the snow out fast enough so you could work on this project in the winter :) Glad you whipped those sneaky, mind-game-playin boards into shape! Looks great



Cait @ Hernando House
June 1, 2011 at 10:34 am
Reply

That looks great!

And I tend to eyeball everything, too. Robert usually measures everything multiple times, makes sure it’s level, etc. Strangely though, the one side of our outdoor shower being unlevel wasn’t my doing (and then he fixed it, so who cares?)



    Emily
    June 1, 2011 at 10:37 am

    Thanks Katrina and Cait! I’m so happy with the end-result.

    Ashley @ DesignBuildLove.co
    June 1, 2011 at 4:04 pm

    LOL… I was thinking the same thing! Eric measure… I eyeball!

    LOVE the new rails. The detail is so clean, simple, and modern! :)

Kate
June 1, 2011 at 12:39 pm
Reply

Great work! I chuckled at the 36* angle – it doesn’t matter how you got there as long as it works, right?



    Emily
    June 1, 2011 at 2:57 pm

    Haha, yes. Whatever we did worked OK. PHEW.

Karin B
February 11, 2012 at 11:06 am
Reply

I’m sorry, but I think it looks cheap and unfinished. It’s also amazingly small for the size of the house. I think you should have gone bigger not smaller. The door looks nice though.



    Emily
    February 11, 2012 at 5:00 pm

    Thanks Karin. Some days I agree. I’d love to build a full porch with overhang along the front of my house. Can I borrow $20,000?

rhd
October 22, 2020 at 9:25 am
Reply

I just had a small porch (contractor built) inspected by the city, hand rails need to be grippable, need to be stable,need riser, step heights didn’t match. Yours looks to meet code except for handrail grip.



    Emily
    January 4, 2021 at 8:47 pm

    Good tip!

April Ypsi
March 10, 2021 at 9:10 pm
Reply

Hi. Love the railing! Did you use finishing nails for the railing boards and “sister” pieces? I don’t see any screws.



    Emily
    May 11, 2021 at 10:38 am

    Yes, I think we did! Or used pocket screws. I can’t remember.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • HI, I’m Emily

    Emily Fazio

    I'm a home improvement enthusiast, living a very merry DIY lifestyle. Follow me on facebook and instagram, or drop me a note if you'd like. I love notes.

    Thanks for visiting!

  • Instagram

    merrypad

    Merrypad by Emily Fazio
    Instagram post 17902304861708711 Instagram post 17902304861708711
    Highly recco mining those #herkimerdiamonds ✌️ Highly recco mining those #herkimerdiamonds ✌️
    Pt. 2: Well before Halloween, the last of the garl Pt. 2: Well before Halloween, the last of the garlic went into the home garden: 10 rows [L>R] 6 whole Nootka Rose as an experiment, 3x8 Mennonite-grown cloves from Aman’s, and 6x8 (and, I think, total 112? notes are cryptic) “normal.”
#gardennotes #growinggarlic #garden2023 #whatisnormal #merrypadathome
    Out of sight but [documented so it’s] not out of Out of sight but [documented so it’s] not out of mind! #garden2024 kicks off with my favorite biennial: elephant garlic! 15 cloves planted from small, to medium, to enormous. #gardennotes
    Annual garlic notes for #garden2023, pt. 1: this i Annual garlic notes for #garden2023, pt. 1: this is getting ooc, and I love it. 👩‍🌾🧑‍🌾

🧄 65% of the planting is in a new plot in the country. 🧄 Seeing if NR grows bigger with more sunlight. 🧄 Big @chasefarms cloves from 2021 were really productive in our home garden; can’t wait to see how they can show up next year in the new space. 🧄

Hand-turned a small bed, but big thanks to my sister, who rolled into town just in time to help me double its size (and did not complain once).
    One straggler from #garlic2021 debuted with 7 stal One straggler from #garlic2021 debuted with 7 stalks and 7 scapes, and I can’t wait to see this mammoth looks like when it’s pulled next month. #garlic2022 

Also, fierce springtime performance by parsley, chamomile, and self-seeded cilantro.
    Annual garlic notes #garden2022 ~315 cloves total Annual garlic notes #garden2022
~315 cloves total
50 in new, unfenced garden
Still need thick mulch on everything
Did a terrible job tracking varieties when I harvested, so it’s all a mix of hardneck now 😒
Added some big cloves from @chasefarms and look forward to adding some @fruition_seeds in #garden2023 when @porterfarmscsa delivers.
    Load More... follow emily: @merrypad



  • Like Us On Facebook

    Facebook Pagelike Widget



  • Popular Posts

    • How to fix an IKEA drawer. The Easy Fix For Broken IKEA Drawers 66.7k views
    • DIY sideboard rehab. 7 Steps for Restoring an Old Midcentury Sideboard Buffet 56.6k views
    • How to design and make a barn quilt. How to Make Your Own Barn Quilt 49.9k views
    • How to hang art on brick surfaces using specialty clips. The Easy Way to Hang Art on Brick or Stone 39.9k views
    • DIY driveway removal. The Driveway Rocks 35k views
    • Our DIY flagstone patio. Building a Flagstone Patio in One Day 32.7k views
    • Tips for dying pasta different colors, and a Halloween Recipe for the kids. How to Dye Pasta Different Colors (Halloween Recipe) 32.5k views
    • Goodbye, gold fireplace covering. Less Is More: How to Remove a Fireplace Surround 29.5k views
    • Fix an ikea dresser drawer. Life Support For An IKEA Dresser 29.4k views
    • After: Custom wooden garden fence. Designing a Durable Wooden Fence For Our Beautiful Backyard Garden 22.9k views



  • BROWSE POSTS BY CATEGORY:

    • Art Attack (7)
    • Backyard (92)
    • Barn (8)
    • Basement (27)
    • Bathroom (43)
    • Beach (13)
    • Bedrooms (73)
    • Being Thrifty (53)
    • Business-y (12)
    • Buying and Renting and Selling (23)
    • Casual Celebrations (36)
    • Closets (17)
    • Curb Appeal (44)
    • Dainty Details (8)
    • Deck (23)
    • Decor (286)
    • Dining Room (37)
    • DIY (577)
    • Dog-Related (24)
    • Entryway (59)
    • Flooring (58)
    • For the Kids (32)
    • Garage (17)
    • Gardening (70)
    • Helping The Economy (30)
    • HGTV + DIY Network Projects (283)
    • Holiday-Related Projects (80)
    • Home Safety (12)
    • Kitchen (83)
    • Lighting (31)
    • Living Room (77)
    • Merry Travels (21)
    • Office Space (21)
    • Organized (41)
    • Other Pads (14)
    • Outdoor Living (12)
    • Scooter Fun (8)
    • Stairwell (20)
    • Sunroom (22)
    • Supporting Sponsors (43)
    • The Art Room (3)
    • Tools (43)
    • Uncategorizable (1)
    • Wedding (28)
    • Windows (14)
    • Work-pads (10)





  • a little bit of everything, friends, DIY, and inspiration

    • Dadand.com < My husband and his BFF
    • DIY Network
    • HGTV
  • Some Legal

    Merrypad incorporates the occasional affiliate link to Amazon.com and Minted; we link to many other websites and products, but if it is in context of a paid sponsorship, it is always noted as such. Please review the privacy policy and contact me if you have any additional questions.

    Theme customized by Pete Fazio Creative, the guy from dadand.com.


© Copyright Merrypad