More About The Porch

I thought a lot about how to build the front porch. This is what I came up with. Across the back two walls of the porch the block is 4 inches taller than across the front. Three inches of the four is for the concrete slab. This will leave a one inch concrete block splash guard on top of which the mudsill and rimjoist will sit. I’m hoping one inch is enough to keep the inevitable rain off the mudsill. My house siding will come down and cover the mudsill also, hiding it as well as hopefully keeping rain off of it.

There are holes drilled in the block for the slab rebar to fit into. While the slab will also sit on top of the rubble fill inside the perimeter I wanted a more secure connection to that block wall. In pic one you can see rebar pieces are not parallel. This is because I wanted the rebar to be concreted into the block wall where a piece of vertical rebar ran.

The dirt on top is only 3-4 inches deep; the rest of the volume is filled with concrete rubble, broken concrete block and anything else I could find (including one old lawn mower - gas and oil drained) that wouldn’t compact easily.

I will keep this covered with plastic to shed rain as I don’t want the block walls to fill up with water. With all that surface bonding cement, this thing would probably hold water like a swimming pool.