$4,850. $6,300. $9,700. In the second half of March, three different people walked around our front porch, crouched by the same soft corner, poked it with the same kind of screwdriver I'd used, and came back with numbers almost five thousand dollars apart.
The short version of how we got here: on March 5 the snow finally slid off the porch, and I stepped on a board by the southwest column that gave like a wet sponge. My screwdriver sank into three boards. Since then an upside-down bucket and a strip of blue painter's tape have kept everyone off that corner, Pim included, and my porch math for this spring got a lot more complicated.
Quote one: the handyman, $4,850
The handyman came first, on March 16. The plan was to cut out the soft boards plus a margin, about 40 square feet in all, lay new tongue-and-groove and paint it to match. The start date was two weeks out, which was tempting. But when I asked why those boards rotted in the first place, the answer was "it's an old porch," and the base of the column, the first thing that looks wrong when you crouch down there, was "a separate job." No column work and no flashing. By the square foot, about $121, it was the most expensive of the three, and it left whatever was letting the water in exactly as it was.
Quote two: the carpenter, $6,300
Kevin runs a one-man carpentry business out of Katonah, and a coworker whose porch steps he rebuilt passed along his number. He stayed close to an hour. He lay on the front walk with a flashlight to look under the porch, pressed his thumb into the bottom of the turned column, and traced the water for me: rain and snowmelt run down that corner column, soak into its base and wick sideways into the ends of the floorboards. That corner faces southwest and takes every storm head on.
His quote covered 64 square feet of new vertical-grain fir tongue-and-groove, a rebuilt base for the southwest column set on a plinth made of a material that can't rot, new flashing at that corner, and primer on every board, all sides, before it goes down, so no raw wood ever touches anything. Three to four days of work. That's about $98 a square foot with the column and flashing included. The catch was the calendar. His first open week is June 1.
Quote three: the general contractor, $9,700
The last quote came in on April 1, for replacing the whole 208-square-foot floor. Per square foot it was the cheapest by far, about $47, and the pitch was fair: one matching floor, one paint job, no line where old meets new. But after the March scare I'd gone over every board on that porch with the screwdriver, and outside that one corner the 1924 fir is sound. Paying to tear out roughly 144 square feet of good floor didn't sit right with either of us, and the plan for the column was no better than Kevin's.
Why we picked the middle one
The question that decided it was one I asked all three: what happens if you open it up and find rot underneath? The handyman said we'd talk about it then. The contractor said it would be a change order. Kevin said he couldn't see the joists without lifting boards, and that if anything under there was soft, he'd stop, text me a photo and give me a price before he touched it. That was the answer I wanted. The thing I can't plan for is a surprise I hear about after it's already on the bill.
So we're paying to fix the cause and not just the symptom, and we're keeping the old floor that's still good. The money comes out of the savings account we call the house fund, not the $500 garden budget, which this would have swallowed twelve times over. We'll prime and paint the new boards ourselves in June. Painting wasn't part of any of the three quotes, and it's the one piece of this job I know how to do.
I didn't call our insurance agent about this one. As we understand our own policy, rot that builds up over years counts as upkeep rather than a sudden event, so this was always going to be ours to pay. Policies differ, and anyone in the same spot should ask their own agent rather than take my word for it.
We signed with Kevin on April 2 for June 1. The tradeoff is two more months of stepping around a bucket, when the handyman could have been finished before the daffodils fade. Mateo has started calling the bucket the porch's cone of shame. Spring break started yesterday, and I'm spending the first morning of it moving pots away from that corner one more time.
