Porch Flooring

[Mike Burke]

Hello, we are in the planning stages of redoing our front porch. It's an old two story home built in 1900. We like the gray flooring look and will be using square white post and railing. We are not keeping it period correct. Not victorian or anything like that.

What would be a good material to use for the flooring ?

I like the idea of composite flooring but have seen some that warps and gets green with slime.
I assume I want to use a tongue and groove flooring, don't really want large gaps like on a deck.

Appreciate suggestions for front porch flooring.

Thanks

[Alex Zeller]

I replaced the decking boards (outside) with hardwood decking. The old pressure treated stuff was checking and splintering. It's been 10 years and the stuff is great. I went with tigerwood. It's easier to work with than some of the others like ipe. Within 6 months it turned silver gray and that's about it for aging. No splinters or checking. I face screwed the boards and then plugged them. I would never buy plastic boards over real wood. At the time the price difference wasn't too much different than composite decking. Now it's probably twice the cost.

[Tom M King]

AZEK or KDAT.

[Richard Coers]

Traditionally is was vertical grain old growth Douglas Fir.

[Cameron Wood]

I've done a bunch of this. Ipe works pretty well & kind of fits in architecturally. One had protected basement below, & I used "Deck 70" urethane membrane over plywood. It has compatible top coat colors but needs a bumpy texture for slip resistance. There are various other membrane and coating systems available- vinyl, rubber, others. T&G fir matches but just doesn't hold up if there's much water exposure, in spite of all back-priming, etc. etc..

[roger wiegand]

The standard in our part of the world is still vertical grain Doug fir. I doubt that what we get is old growth, but the growth rings are still pretty small. Just be sure to run it perpendicular to the house with just a slight slope so the water runs off. Looks good and lasts for many decades in New England.

[Jim Morgan]

Unless your porch is weather-proof, do not use tongue and groove flooring - water will get into the joints and cause the flooring to rot prematurely.

If you are going to paint the flooring, be sure to prime on all sides and edges before installation.

[Mel Fulks]

You can use plywood with a slight slope , covered with canvas glued down and painted . Goes back to 1890s ( with boards).
Lasts for years .

[Mike Burke]

Thanks for the suggestions.
I am thinking about going with vertical grain fir flooring. I think thats the standard here also. I live in southeast Iowa. Our porch isn't weather proof, it is covered with the house roof, so would get more snow than rain i suppose.

If I go with Fir flooring, do I use T&G or just square edge flooring....maybe its not even made non T&G.
I assume there would have to be a sub floor of 3/4 plywood underneath the Fir flooring ?

I have never installed flooring, have refinished several rooms in our house though, mostly this same flooring ( vertical grain fir) and have resided our entire house with 1/2 x 6 redwood lap siding.

Thanks

[Cameron Wood]

Definitely no plywood under the porch flooring.

[Jim Morgan]

Definitely no plywood under the porch flooring.

Any moisture that gets in - whether rain or snow - needs a way to escape. Pitching the floorboards towards the perimeter of the porch, as suggested earlier, helps. The gaps between the boards provide another avenue for moisture to drain.

A variety of sticky-backed waterproofing membranes are available. Laying this on top of the joists before installing the flooring will help to preserve the structural integrity of your porch.

[Holmes Anderson]

Hello, we are in the planning stages of redoing our front porch. It's an old two story home built in 1900. We like the gray flooring look and will be using square white post and railing. We are not keeping it period correct. Not victorian or anything like that.

What would be a good material to use for the flooring ?

I like the idea of composite flooring but have seen some that warps and gets green with slime.
I assume I want to use a tongue and groove flooring, don't really want large gaps like on a deck.

Appreciate suggestions for front porch flooring.

Thanks

If you plan to leave it unfinished, then a tropical hardwood will last longer than doug fir. Cedar is another option for an unfinished deck allowed to go grey. Port Orford cedar is stronger than the red but more susceptible to rot. Leave a 1/8" gap between boards to allow rain water to drain and airflow to dry the boards. T&G will allow rainwater to stand. Face screws with plugs are labor intensive and miserable to remove. Hidden fastener systems are easier. Stainless has long been the standard for fastening tropical hardwoods. I have had bad results with non-stainless fasteners and tropical hardwoods but I haven't tried the latest composite and coated decking screws. If you are lazy and don't care much what it looks like then pre-drill and face screw but don't install T&G as a horizontal surface subjected to weather unless you are building your porch like the deck of a boat.

[Mike Burke]

I plan on painting it the typical Gray.
I understand the water issues that you don't water standing on the wood.
This what I have to work with.
What did the old timers use on these old porches ? Isn't T&G the typical flooring material used ? 502402

[Jim Morgan]

I'm only 71, so I hardly qualify as an old-timer, but I don't recall ever seeing anything other than square-edged boards for porch flooring.

When I rebuilt my front porch several years ago, I used meranti (a/k/a lauan or Phillipine mahogany) for flooring. Unpainted, it is not as durable as CVG Doug fir, but it is similar in Janka hardness and (at that time) was considerably cheaper. I used plastic biscuit-type hidden fasteners. Most of the boards were marked and cut for individual biscuits. The final two or three boards had to be tapered slightly to maintain even spacing; a track saw came in particularly handy for that. These last boards were grooved on the edges so they could be slid into place from the front of the porch.

502403

[Darrell Bade]

Guess I'm the oddball here ........ I say go composite and be done with it. I would never do wood again no matter how durable it is suppose to be ..... based on past experience.

[Holmes Anderson]

I plan on painting it the typical Gray.
I understand the water issues that you don't water standing on the wood.
This what I have to work with.
What did the old timers use on these old porches ? Isn't T&G the typical flooring material used ? 502402

I usually see T&G porch decks on old Victorian houses that have a roof with generous overhang, knee wall instead of railing, and relatively steep pitch of the porch deck. They are sometimes screened-in. Those t&g boards don't see much rainwater. If yours failed, then there is a reason that it failed so maybe something has to change. If you just want to rebuild it the way it was originally built then pull up a couple of boards and see how it was built. Is that metal railing original?

[Mike Burke]

I will do some digging to see if there is any of the original flooring underneath. I doubt it though.
I'm sure the metal railing is Not original. Someone probably redid this porch in the 80s and thought they would "remodel" the porch and get rid of all the original material, maybe because it was rotten, like you mention. That would be my guess.
Thanks

[dennis thompson]

We have front, side and back porches. I got tired of refinishing them every few years and had them replaced with Trex. Wash them off each spring and I’m done. Needless to say, we are very happy with the change.

[Jared Sankovich]

Every old porch I've come across was tongue and groove, and painted. Typical decking doesn't look right (imho) as a porch.

[Tom M King]

Every porch around these parts has T&G flooring. My Grandfather's house, built in 1870 had Heart Pine T&G on maybe 1,000 sq. ft. of wraparound porch. It lasted until 1981. I know because I was the one that changed it to treated. I bought my first floor sander for working on that porch. Even before I changed the wood, it needed some work and new paint every year.

The first paint job on the new flooring lasted a few years, but after that the recoating was much more frequent.

Painted wood just looks right on the old houses, but it's an ongoing maintenance thing. I think I would only use it on museum houses now, that have an upkeep budget.

[Mel Fulks]

The painted canvas ,going back to at least 1890 , keeps the paint on. Stops the frequent maintenance. Selling it to the “I ain’t ever
heard of that before “, people ; Is only possible with pics and brochures . It was also used on ships, …..the ones in water ,not the
ones in the Smithsonian.

[John Pendery]

Another good option I’ve installed is a thermally modified or “torrefied” porch flooring product (usually ash but maybe this is changing?). There are a couple different manufacturers here in the US. It’s a very stable and durable alternative to tropical hardwoods. Comes in several widths and the ends of the boards are milled in such a way as to create a structural butt joint that can break mid span (16” oc), saving a bit on waste depending on layout.

[Rich Engelhardt]

Painted canvas was on it's way out back in the 1960s in NE Ohio.
The decent oil based paints that worked best were all slowly being phased out.

Those metal posts supporting the roof give me the willies.....

[Mel Fulks]

In the 1960’s the paint was different. There are many good paints now , and there are many pressure treated hideous decks now.
Something is always being discarded . Linoleum was discarded and replaced with inferior stuff , now linoleum is expensive enough
to be good again !

[Mel Fulks]

Another thing about the painted canvas. Paint soaks into canvas it’s not just a top coat.
When you see a painter with paint on his shirt today ….you will see it again . You can scrape
dried paint off of wood and and metal , but you won’t scrape it off of cloth .

[Cameron Wood]

Another thing about the painted canvas. Paint soaks into canvas it’s not just a top coat.
When you see a painter with paint on his shirt today ….you will see it again . You can scrape
dried paint off of wood and and metal , but you won’t scrape it off of cloth .

If you were putting canvas on a porch floor, would you glue it down?, tack the edges? what glue? what about seams?

[Mel Fulks]

I’ve only done one, used I think ,plastic resin glue. In the early days of canvas porches the canvas was ‘glued’ down with paint.
Today I would use 3/4” good 1 side plywood and Tite Bond 2. Plywood would be splined and glued.
Sorry, I didn’t address the seams . Canvas is sold like sewing cloth , what they call a selvege edge, meaning a woven strip on
both factory edges that does not unravel. I would overlap one piece over another 2 or 3 inches.

[Mel Fulks]

There have been magazine articles about canvas porches ,but I don’t remember which ones , I do remember they were old house mags.
Try google too.

[Tom Bender]

We installed cedar decking carefully primed and painted both sides. In 5 years it was peeling so we removed it, scraped it, dried it in the sun then reprimed and painted both sides. 5 years later it was peeling again so we went with Trex. 10 years later it's still fine. Also covered the t 111 with good quality vinyl siding and aluminum soffits. Only 2 door frames still have painted wood in the weather. Now we can grow old in comfort.