From Hillbilly Spectacular To...

Thanks to two of my Uncles' help, the outside of the porch is finally finished!

When I last left off, it was looking like this...

And now, in all it's splendorous glory, it's looking like this...

Yeah, go ahead and say it.. "holy cow it looks like a totally different porch"!

My dad managed to do all the J-channeling around the porch on his own during the evenings.  Then this weekend, two of my Uncles came over to lend a helping hand (and brain) into actually siding the sucker.

Surprisingly, thanks in large part to my uncles, it only took half a day to side.  My Uncle John amazed my mom, aunt and I.  He can eye ball a measurement, saw a piece of siding, and voila it fits perfectly.  I guess being a contractor allows you to develop a super human measuring tape eye... I'm picturing something like The Terminator's, but with less killing and more precision cutting.

Here is a close up of the siding.  Each piece was 2 layers and then the next piece just snapped into place over the first.  Sorry there are no during pictures, the guys were moving so fast, I didn't want to interrupt.

After my uncles called it a day, my dad and I had one last part to finish.

This little baby gap needed regular siding that was used on the rest of the house.  My dad had plenty of extra siding lying around from years ago.  He used his table saw to cut small 6 inch sections.  The saw caused some minor crack-a-lack-age, but we went ahead and used it anyways.  My dad's electric saw met an untimely death when Elsie got a hold of the cord and chewed it off...

But getting back on track, it really didn't take too much time to finish.

Here is the view from afar.. Lets all ooo and awww. 

Brace yourself for the before and after for comparison.

We took the porch from the Hillbilly looking spectacular it was, to the respectable and dignified extra house appendage it now is. 

This coming weekend we have plans to get out the power washer and finally spray off the green nasties growing on the house.  So when it's all through the house will gleam white and probably cause wrecks along the highway!

Then the outside will be finished, but the inside still needs a lot of work.

The floor needs primed and painted.  And the inside walls need scraped and repainted.  Later this fall, my dad plans on insulating the whole shebang and putting up some tongue and grove boards along the the outside walls to really country up the place.

Meanwhile he wants to start painting the entire south barn and I've begun trying to halter break two heifers (look for a post on that thrilling adventure later this week)... the projects never end.