Porch Progress

This is where we left the porch yesterday (picture left) at the end of the day. It takes a while to get the corners lined up along the diagonal line. Underneath the edge and unseen to the eye are two framing members that stretch from the corner of the house to the corner on the post.

The line looks like it shoots off at about 45 degrees but it doesn't. It's actually about 48 degrees. So what? What does that matter?

Well, it's a matter of aesthetics. The two sides of the porch have lines that intersect perpendicular to one another(90 degrees), or almost perpendicular concerning our porch here. The joint where they intersect in this case is called a miter joint. The angle of that miter joint is determined by drawing a line between the corner of the house to the corner of the porch's corner post. That angle is at 48 degrees. The intersecting angle is 42 degrees. Plug in your Pythagorean Theorem (A squared + B squared = C squared) and you find that one angle is longer than another, so that when they meet up at 90 degrees, they don't line up.

Long story short, we could have cut the miter joint at 45 degrees but that would have caused our line from the corner of our house to the corner of the post to skew way off into some place that looked entirely unnatural.

So once we worked through that we were ready to rock. We were able to get a lot of the porch down. It really looks great. Tomorrow we'll get pretty close to getting it all down.