This is to remind you of what our porch currently looks like.
In the photo above, all of the flooring and trim and the beadboard ceiling are new. All that's left to do is to decide on a design for the posts and railing and brackets and the rest of the decoration. Unfortunately, no evidence exists to give me any clue about what our porch looked like originally, so we are making this up as we go along.
In my LAST POST about this, one lovely reader reminded me about the Historic American Building Survey collection online at the Library of Congress web site. I dug through hundreds of photographs looking for details that I could use as inspiration, and I found this wonderful porch on a house in California.
Photo of the Andrew Landrum House from HABS site.
I love how the brackets and posts are ornately decorated, but the decorations are not the first thing that catches my eye. It's the way each element is used in perfect proportion that I love about this porch.
HABS photo
My favorite porch so far is one that I saw on a trip to West Virginia earlier this month. If I could teleport the decorative elements from this porch to my house, I would do it in an instant. It is totally, completely perfect!! Perfect enough, in fact, that I would make a return trip if I had the time to trace the brackets and balusters and use them as is on our house ... this is saying a lot, because I rarely copy anything.
Isn't this gorgeous????
I love the chamfered posts, and the brackets are perfect. The barge boards that were original to our house had a motif on them that is similar to the three-winged design on these brackets. They seem more Gothic than Victorian, and that's exactly what I'm hunting for.
If I decide to copy some brackets or balusters (that aren't already available commercially) I ran across a web site yesterday for Victorian Woodshop, a woodworking shop in northern California that specializes in reasonably priced Victorian brackets and other ornaments ... and he does custom orders and historic reproductions!! I imagine he will be getting an order from me, when I finally decide what I want.