Governor's Antiques is a HUGE architectural salvage yard. We went there to see if we could find some inspiration for the renovation of our front porch.
Those of you who have been with me for any time at all may remember that our porch is structurally sound (after being rebuilt in 2005) but completely without any sort of pretty stuff. Designing the details, with no evidence of what may have been there when our house was built in 1848, has been challenging. I have planned and plotted, and reworked the design many times, and nothing has seemed to be exactly right.
We went to Governor's specifically to find a corbel or porch bracket that we can use as a pattern. As luck would have it, the staff there had just finished moving the whole stock of corbels to an inside area, perfectly organized.
All of these are fabulous, but almost every one is WAY too large for our porch. We weighed our options and came up with two possibilities:
I like the simple curve of this one, and the size is perfect.
This one is also nearly perfect.
We plan to make our own corbels, incorporating elements from our home's original trim, which is long gone.
The gingerbread trim, on the eaves and above the porch and bay windows, is the original. The porch columns and railings are not. There is no evidence of what the original porch may have looked like.
The bat-wing-looking motif is very common in Gothic Revival decoration. The second bracket from Governor's could easily be modified to have a cut-out that looks something like this one:
photo from Pinterest.
Our visit to Governor's helped us clarify our design for the porch brackets, but it seriously muddied the plan for the porch posts. I have been working with the idea of square columns, with chamfered corners, boxed on the bottom, with stacked moldings at the top. One of the posts in this pile, I'm not telling you which one, has the potential to destroy all of that planning ... in a VERY good way.
I saw three of them, and we need four. I will let you know if the young lady at Governor's succeeds in her search for another one.
We bought the brackets that I showed you. Either design will be great inspiration for whatever there is to come with the porch. Seems like this is a never-ending process, with SO many choices. Our goal is to be finished with it by the end of summer. Wish us luck.