Roughing It

     It doesn't look like much yet, but here is the front porch project. I used 1/2" plywood sheets from the Michaels store for most of the club's porches. It was expensive, and I had some left-over 1/2" plywood that I had purchase at a lumber yard/do-it-yourself store.  So, I used that instead. It doesn't take much effort to see the difference in quality.

    The surface veneer above the left window and the front door popped loose in the cutting-out phase of construction, and even other pieces may eventually pop off of the frame for me. Fortunately, that will all be covered over and no one will ever know (except you) how crummy it looked!

Another thing I did to save on production costs was to make the angled roof section out of a couple of smaller pieces of plywood. I then pieced them together in the center, and glued a piece of plywood to help support the joint where the two pieces meet. You can see small dark oval spots along the edge of the roof area, just above the windows and door. Those are pocket screws. This requires a special tool (jig) which helps me to drill those holes at an angle. The advantage of pocket screws is that they help a builder to anchor a couple of flat surfaces together - like this or at angles. Glue alone would not be a satisfactory way to put this together. It's just not sturdy enough.

By the way, I used my Office 2010 software to modify the photograph above so that you can really focus in on the house structure in spite of the clutter of my workbench. I love playing with some of the new software that's out there. You can do some really interesting things with it!