Porch Skirting Progress (The Hardest Part — Tackling The Corner Of The Porch)

I got all of the full stones attached to the front, but I still need to cut and attach the small stone pieces to fill in those five small spaces.

And then I got this far on the side. I know the rotted skirting board is distracting. Obviously, that will be replaced. I’ll replace that as soon as I’m finished with the stone skirting.

But the reason I’m so excited about my progress, even though I didn’t finish, is because I got past the hardest part — the corner. It didn’t quite work out the way I expected it to, so I had to come up with a Plan B. And that Plan B worked out way better than I expected it to.

So let me back up a bit and start from the beginning on this corner. I don’t know if you can tell from this “before” picture, but the corner of this porch was a complete mess.

It wasn’t square or plumb. It was chipped and uneven. This corner is what made my previous attempts at attaching any kind of facade to the skirting area a failure. So I knew I would have to address it and fix it this time around before I could even attempt attaching the stones to it.

The process was fairly easy. After using my handheld grinder to grind down the side of the concrete to remove the ridges, bumps, dirt, and any previous coatings that may have been added by previous owners, and making sure that I was down to bare concrete, I sprayed the concrete with water and then slathered on a thick coat of mortar mix on the concrete using my trowel. And then I used my steel carpenter’s square, with the shorter (16″) side flat along the front of the porch and the long (24″) side on the side of the porch, and starting at the bottom, I slid it up towards the top to remove any excess mortar mix, leaving a square corner.

Here’s a view from the front to show you just how much mortar I had to add to build out that corner and make it square.

But that thickness tapered off as it got to that 24-inch mark on my carpenter’s square on the side so that the new mortar feathered into the existing concrete.

Side note: When I’m working outside, Tiger is always close by. This is his favorite corner to sleep, so he kept me company and kept me entertained the whole time I was working.

Anyway, once that mortar was dry, I was then able to wrap the stones around the corner and continue on the sides.

I measured and marked how much of the stone I would need to cover the front of the porch, and then I made a straight cut using my wet tile saw.

And then I placed the stone around the corner like this…

By that time, the mortar that was left in my bucket had a firmer, workable consistency, but it wasn’t dried out. It was still wet, but it was just firm enough that I could use my hands and mold it. So I packed that corner with mortar and used my hands to shape and blend it in with the stones on either side to form a corner. I had to keep reminding myself that it needed to look like chiseled stone, so I wasn’t aiming for a perfect, sharp corner.

Here’s what it looked like from the side with the mortar still wet.

And here’s the corner view showing the front…

I’m pretty proud of how this turned out. In hindsight, I probably should have used the concrete mix instead of the mortar mix for this. The concrete mix that I used for the stones uses a very fine sand as the aggregate, so it has a much smoother look to it. The aggregate in the mortar mix isn’t big at all, but it’s much larger than the fine sand, so it has a rougher look to it. But I don’t think anyone is going to be inspecting these corners as closely as I do. And once it’s all primed and painted to match the stone on the rest of the house, I think it’ll look great.

As you can see, Tiger was very impressed with my solution for the corner stones as well. 😀

Okay, well, he may not have been impressed, but I was. 😀 I’m so close to being finished with this portion of the project (i.e., attaching the stones), and then I just need to mortar the spaces between the stones, let that dry, and then prime and paint. I can’t believe that after all these years, I’m finally going to have a finished skirting on our front porch.

I also still need to do this little area on the other side of the front steps. I can’t forget that! It’s not finished until the whole thing is covered.

Let’s see what Tiger thinks about that…

I’m pretty sure he agrees. 😀 This cat seriously cracks me up. Every time I’d look over at him, he was in a new position. Some of his positions were so funny, but when I’d reach for my phone to get a picture, he’d hear me and sit up to see what I was doing before I could get a picture. He’s quite entertaining, though.