Passion & Faith Designs

One of the parents from my youngest child’s school asked if I had ever built an Oak Porch? I replied that I had not, but always keen for a challenge. So we chatted over a coffee and came to the design and importantly timber sizes; the client wanted to use 5” x 5” seasoned oak for the main structure with 5” x 3” for the remainder.

The Oak was sourced from English Timber who had some 5 year old seasoned timber, perfect. To save time on site, I decided, rightly or wrongly, to try and build as much as I could in my workshop. Especially, as once the wood was delivered the rough sawn timber was heavily stained and dirty, and needed a good clean up. I must have spent so many hours sanding with a belt sander to bring the wood up to a decent finish.

Having never worked with Oak, I had to quickly forget most of what I knew about marking and cutting on wood that was not flat, not square and not uniform in thickness; even on the same piece of wood. Hand sawing was brutal, my chisels took a battering, and in constant need of sharpening.

My design was so that everything should slot together, especially the front sections; uprights, cross member and rafter. When it came to installation, it was fairly straight forward as for the most part I had left excess material for trimming to length, which work out well, with some minor alterations to namely the joist birds mouth angles not being quite accurate.

The main uprights are helped in place but a 15mm thick rod that runs down into the brick pillar and extends up into the bottom of the Oak support. The rear joist is mechanically fixed to the external wall, and Oak plugs to cover the heads of the bolts. Once tiling was finished and I could stand back, admire many hours of blood sweat and tears (almost), even if I do say so myself: it looks stunning.

Testimonial:An excellent collaboration. Nic is always flexible and open to working through the design ideas so that I ended up with exactly what I wanted. He was a pleasure to work with, and can look back fondly on the whole project.