The best thing about having the old front porch gone is that now I can see the witness marks of the original porch. See that dark band underneath the eaves? That's the original roofline.
I suspected, from looking at the two old photos that I have of the house, that the original porch was a little bit smaller than the one that was built in the 1960s. The witness marks confirm that the original porch roof was even with the side of the house, not sticking past it a foot or so like the recently departed one.
Here's another close-up of the witness marks, because you just can't post too many photos of old clapboards covered with leaves and dirt.
Next Wednesday (the 25th) Mare will be here to take measurements of those witness marks and draw a diagram of what the new construction will look like. I'll need that to attach to my building permit application.
Because of another job he's working on and a trip to Montana and Wyoming, Mare won't be able to start work on the new porch until the end of July. That's okay, because I have plenty to do in the meantime. I need to have all that demolition debris hauled away first, which will either be easy but expensive, or cheap but difficult. (Still working out the particulars.) Then I'll scrape and paint the eaves of the house, which will be a lot easier to do with no porch in the way. Between rain and OT at work, it may take me a month to accomplish all that.
And just so you know, while I was writing this post, I was singing this in my head: