Pulling apart my porches. I'm trying to find how sound and cold air are getting in. The first porch I hit was a small one, finished with drywall that was already badly damaged so I just pulled it all down. Now I can see underneath the porch. It's a lot better than I expected it to be but I noticed a couple of gaps in the roof of it (nothing huge, but enough to leak a little), and a reasonable size hole in the exterior wall of the house that supports a beam. Then the larger porch at the front of the house needed some similar work but ripping down all the trim there would end up costing me a lot of money if I had to buy enough wood to replace it all, so I cut some calculated holes in the wood so I could see behind and figure what's going on. As I expected I have beams resting in holes in the wall with air gaps all around but thankfully not as many as I feared, and I think I've found them all. So what I can do is stuff them with insulating material and then squirt foam in to make sure they are weather proof.
Along the way I found where the wires that power the porch light come out of the house. That really wasn't what I expected, and I'm trying to figure out how it's been done and expecting to find another hideous botch. At least now I know what I'm up against and when it's time to rebuild that room I've got a good idea what to expect. I'm seriously thinking about tweaking the switching - at present I've got one switch that operates one light and another switch that operates another. I'm tempted to tweak it so that both switches operate both lights. It would mean I could just get rid of the nasty cables coming out of the wall. I'd just need to figure out how to get a piece of 14/3 cable from one switch to the other.
