Then & Now
Thirty Years, Four Looks, Same Five Steps
One family photo accidentally captured the back stoop in 1999. Two makeovers later, those same five steps are still doing their job.
Nobody took this photograph because of the back stoop.
Our German family was visiting in 1998 or 1999, and my young nephew had become fast friends with Bruegger.
Somebody wanted a photograph of the two of them together, so that's what we got... a little boy from Germany and his American beagle buddy.
Twenty-seven or twenty-eight years later, however, I found myself looking past both of them.
Look at those steps.
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| 1998 or 1999. My nephew, visiting from Germany, and his new best friend Bruegger. Nobody was trying to photograph the back stoop, which is precisely why I'm so glad it's there. |
The Stoop Nobody Was Photographing
When we came to House 173 in 1997, those steps were already here.
So were the railings.
So was that porch post.
And for quite a while, that's simply what the back entrance looked like.
Nothing particularly offensive about it. Nothing particularly beautiful either.
It was a back stoop.
You walked up it.
You walked down it.
Dogs used it.
Groceries came through it.
People visiting from Germany stood in front of it while having their pictures taken with beagles.
It did its job.
Looking at the photograph now, though, I notice things I certainly wasn't thinking about then.
The gray steps.
The tired white post.
The fairly bare patch of yard beside them.
The stuff sitting on the porch because apparently even in 1999 we weren't staging photographs for a future home-improvement blog.
Mostly, though, I notice how unfamiliar it looks. Not because the basic shape has changed very much.
Because we hadn't really gotten to it yet.
That's one of the strange things about living in the same house for a long time. Eventually it's difficult to remember which parts were yours from the beginning and which parts slowly became yours along the way.
Fortunately, photographs remember.
Not Quite A Makeover
The first time we decided to do something about the back stoop wasn't really a makeover.
We painted it.
I'm not entirely sure what year this photograph was taken, but by then the old gray stoop we'd inherited with the house had gotten a coat of beige paint (beige was in back then, and seems to be making a comeback).
And that was pretty much it.
The same railings were still there. The same posts. The same steps. The same basic stoop that had been behind my nephew and Bruegger in that earlier photograph.
It just looked considerably less tired.
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| Not quite a makeover. The original stoop and railings were still doing their jobs; we'd simply given the whole thing a coat of beige paint. |
There's something wonderfully familiar to me about this version.
It represents that stage of owning an old house when you haven't necessarily figured out what you eventually want something to become.
You just know it could look a little better than it does.
So you paint it.
For a while, that was enough.
And looking at it now, I'm glad we didn't immediately tear everything apart. That old stoop had already been there for decades before we arrived. There was no particular reason it couldn't keep doing its job while we figured things out.
Eventually, though, paint wasn't going to be enough.
Makeover No. 1
By 2016, the back stoop and I had reached an understanding.
It needed work.
The railings that had been there when we bought House 173 were loose. The decking had taken years of Upstate New York winters, snow and salt. And after several earlier attempts at stain and paint, the whole thing was looking pretty tired.
So I did what I apparently do with perfectly serviceable structures around here.
I took them apart.
The old railings came down.
The decking was sanded back.
The steps were refurbished.
I built new railings with much heavier posts and three horizontal rails, and even rebuilt the doors underneath the stoop.
And when it was finished, it looked like this.
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| The 2016 version. New railings, refurbished steps and decking, and a back entrance that was beginning to look considerably more like ours. |
I was pretty proud of those railings.
Actually, I still am.
I'd built them myself, and the chunky posts gave that little stoop considerably more presence than it had before.
The whole area had changed by then, too.
Compare this photograph with the first two.
The original gray stoop had become the beige stoop, and the beige stoop had finally become something substantially different.
The bare patch beside the steps had become garden.
The porch exterior had changed.
The entrance no longer looked like something we had simply inherited with the house.
It looked intentional.
It looked like House 173.
FROM THE STACKS · 2016
Eight Years Is Apparently Long Enough
And then House 173 did what houses do.
It kept sitting outside.
Rain fell on it.
Snow sat on it.
Salt got tracked across it.
Summer sun baked it.
And eight years passed.
By 2024, some of those railings I had been so proud of were actually growing fungus... I suppose everyone needs a hobby.
More importantly, some of the decking had loosened and the stoop was showing its age again.
There was also another problem.
We had just spent a good portion of the summer finally finishing the exterior of the back porch, a project whose origins stretched all the way back to 2016.
The cedar shingles were gone. The long-delayed Flagstone siding was finally installed. New window sills had been made. Trim had been repaired and painted.
The porch looked finished.
The stoop suddenly looked like it had missed the meeting.
So... here we went again.
Makeover No. 2
This time I knew what I wanted to keep.
The basic structure was sound.
The steps were still doing their job.
And although the 2016 railings had reached the end of theirs, I still liked their proportions and substantial posts.
So this wasn't about reinventing the back entrance. It was about giving it another go.
The railings came off.
The old decking came up.
The masonry underneath got some attention.
New decking went down.
And then came another generation of railings, painted white against the darker steps and the Flagstone siding we'd finally gotten around to installing on the porch.
Which brings us here.
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| The back stoop today. Same entrance. Same job. Another generation of railings, and considerably more garden than we started with. |
Look at the first photograph again.
Then look at this one.
The steps haven't moved.
The door is still where it was.
The little concrete walk still brings you to the same place.
HOUSE 173 NOTE
One reason I keep old photographs—even the seemingly unimportant ones... is exactly this. A family snapshot from 1998 or 1999 turned out to contain the best record I have of what this little corner of House 173 looked like at the beginning.
But almost everything around them has changed.
The porch has changed.
The siding has changed.
The railings have changed twice.
The colors have changed.
And perhaps my favorite part of the comparison:
the garden grew up.
In that first photograph, the yard beside the stoop is mostly grass. Now the entrance is practically tucked into the plants.
You can measure nearly thirty years in lumber and paint if you want.
Apparently you can also measure it in leaves.
FROM THE STACKS · 2024
The Same Five Steps
This isn't one of those dramatic before-and-after stories where we tore out something horrible and replaced it with something completely different.
I think I like it better because we didn't.
Apparently I don't replace back steps, I just keep renegotiating the terms of their employment.
The same little entrance has been adapting along with the rest of House 173 for nearly thirty years.
A railing here.
A coat of paint there.
A major overhaul.
Another major overhaul.
Four photographs now tell the story pretty well:
The stoop we inherited.
The stoop we painted.
The stoop we rebuilt.
And the stoop we rebuilt again.
Same five steps.
Plants growing taller beside it.
Materials changing as we learned what worked and what didn't.
Things changed because they needed changing, or because I had an idea, or because apparently I am constitutionally incapable of leaving perfectly functional things alone.
But the steps kept doing exactly what they had always done.
They brought us home.
We point the camera at the people because they're the part we don't want to forget. Years later, we discover we saved everything behind them, too. - GS, House 173
Fortunately, We Got It Anyway
That's one of the useful things about old family photographs.
We point the camera at the people because they're the part we don't want to forget.
Years later, we discover we saved everything behind them, too.
The furniture.
The cars.
The wallpaper.
The trees before they got big.
The thing sitting on the kitchen counter that nobody has seen in twenty years.
And sometimes, apparently, a back stoop.
Once you start looking, you find it again. There it is behind the pumpkins, freshly painted beige.
There it is after the first real makeover.
And there it is today.
Nobody ever set out to make a twenty-seven-year photographic record of five back steps. We just kept taking pictures while they were there.
I wouldn't trade that first photograph for a perfectly composed architectural picture of these steps in 1999.
Because the steps weren't important that day. My nephew was visiting from Germany. He and Bruegger had become fast friends.
Somebody saw the two of them together and picked up a camera.
That was the photograph worth taking. The back stoop just happened to be there.
Nearly thirty years and two makeovers later... it still is.
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Keep Wandering
There’s more to see around House 173. Choose one below and wander in.
Back Porch Rehab '24: The Megapost
The back stoop wasn't the only part of the porch that took the long way around.
What began in 2016 finally became a finished back-porch exterior eight years later.
Hey, thanks for stopping by - see ya' next time!
