Saturday, June 16, 2012

Replacing our Awning/Arbor/Pergola, gutter and patching stucco

Before

After

When we first bought our house we had a redwood deck and simple awning over our backyard patio right outside our back door. One of the things that the house inspector identified as a problem was a lot of rotting on the deck. I eventually pulled out the deck and repaired the 4x4 uprights holding up the awning. Even at that time I knew the awning needed to be replaced, but I didn't have the time or budget to do it right, that was 10 years ago.

We had a contractor come and look at replacing our kitchen, but we also wanted to fix up a few things on the outside of the house and I walked him around to all of the things that I thought were issues with the house that needed care. The immediate concern was the main beam holding up the awning. It was made of 3 boards screwed or nailed together and were rotted so bad it seemed that it could fall down at any moment. He first quoted me on replacing the beam, but I realized the whole thing was rotting so I had it replaced.
One of the things I never cleaned up from removing the deck was one of the concrete pylons that held up the deck was left behind in the dirt.

Looks pretty small when you see that 2x4 next to it, but it's like an iceberg. Here's the rest of the concrete below the surface
I guess they really wanted that deck to stay in place!

When he tore down all of the boards, even the ones tying the awning to the wall of the house, I was surprised to see this scallop pattern

 It looks like there was a corrugated plastic or metal roof over our deck at one time. This is why it would have been slanted instead of flat like most wooden awnings.

When the contractor was installing the awning he was continually giving me options for how much slant, if any, did I want, did I want decorative or flat ends etc. etc. I was very pleased with how it turned out.






In addition to the awning needing replacement, I had never patched the stucco outside the sliding glass door from the floor repair and installation.



I also realized that the gutter on the west side of the house was slanted the wrong way so it always had water in gutter after it rained, this caused it to eventually rust through and start dripping rusty water on the ground.


 The gutter installer decided the simplest way to fix the drainage issue was to connect the long run of the gutter to the short run on the roof extension.



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