Historic Home Remodeling: Preserving and Re-Coating Old Porch Decking
Published On: June 10, 2017 Posted by: Jeremy Peterson
Our 110 year-old home has an enormous front porch that is great for enjoying summer evenings outside. It has been painted several times over the decades and by the time we purchased the home, the surface was downright distressed. Recently, we set out to protect and preserve the surface for years to come.
We have spent a lot of time and energy on other parts of the house. I took to priming the porch a couple of times in anticipation of finishing the deck surface but we never got around to getting it done. That is, until this last month.
We purchased a product at Lowes called Rescue It! made by Olympic. It is a thick latex based paint that has sand mixed in. It is designed to cover wood, concrete, and other exterior walking surfaces.
We applied our first coat of paint to the deck. We selected a Jefferson Tan color. As you can see from the results, we were given a mis-tint by the guy working the paint kiosk that day. He was distracted talking to friends and hastily mixed up our batch. But, not all was lost. The initial coat exposed a lot of weak spots in the decking surface.
Deep seam cracks were revealed in their full glory once the coat was applied. These cracks speed up the weathering process by trapping moisture.
So, we took to filling the cracks with wood putty. We wiped up the excess as we applied it to avoid eliminating the tongue-and-groove look of the deck. Then we went back to Lowes and obtained a much darker color (for free) to avoid any more mis-tint problems.
Here is the finished project. The total effort took us a little over 10 hours of scraping, sanding, puttying, prep, and paint. The paint went on so thick that it took about 10 days for the paint to cure completely. It was walkable after a couple days but still tacky. We used our back door to avoid traffic on the fresh surface until it could dry. We are very happy with the results!
