New Front Door Casing

The viable outside work days are winding down fast and before we know it, it will be winter. Because of this, we are steadily working to finish the front of the house.  We have removed the non original door casing on the front door and rebuilt it based on the other original exterior door casings. Those doors have 5 inch wide casings but we constructed these to be 6 inches wide so that they lined up with the edge of the concrete threshold.  The casings were made of 2X8's ripped down to 6 inches wide.

The next part of the front door rebuild consisted of reshingling but first we needed to come up with a plan to keep the shingles off the concrete porch.  Obviously the original set up was not ideal because rain water would flow back towards the house saturating the cedar shingles and then making it's way behind the porch and between the porch and cement block wall.

First things first, we needed to remove all the dirt and debris so that we could get a good look.  This is where the air gun worked like a charm to blow out the debris.  We were left with a space about 3/4 inch deep.

We fixed any missing tar paper and covered the area with metal flashing.  The flashing was pushed down as far as we could and then nailed just at the top.  Now what?  We had to find a way to keep the shingles from wicking up moisture AND stop the water from running under the shingles.  I had previously used some solid PVC drip edge over the tops of a few windows and still had some left over in my wood pile (I don't have a PVC pile).

I also had an almost full tube of clear silicone.  So R filled up the void with clear silicone and then ran a bead of silicone on the bottom of the PVC drip edge.  We then set the drip edge onto the silicone.

We have no idea if this is going to keep the water from getting behind the porch but we think it will keep the moisture from getting to the shingles.  

We have 1 1/2 rows left to complete on this side of the door.  The other wall will require some sheathing repair because of water damage (no eave trough when we purchased the house).  Then we will repeat the the PVC drip edge/silicone process and then reshingle.  Rain is in the forecast for Tuesday so we are under the gun, so to speak.

Update....the window well that we installed in front of the coal door is working like a charm. Between the well and the additional top soil that we added has kept the rain water from draining towards the house. Love it when something does work as planned.

Speaking of working......several years ago I purchased three very expensive light bulbs for the front porch light and the two lights on the brick pillars on each side of the driveway gate.  Three weeks after installing them, they quit working.  But because they all quit at the same time I thought we had cut a wire etc.  Before R removed the porch light he tried a brand new light bulb and low and behold it worked.  Really?  The last three years we have gone without a light and all it was was a burnt out light bulb.  So I purchased an LED bulb and we'll see how long that will last.