First a couple of things. Yes, this poor bracket looks abused. It was abused by rain, wind, sun, and extreme neglect. In the 17 years that we've lived here leading up to this work... I never touched it. I probably looked at it a couple of times a year and scratched my head trying to figure out what I was going to do. The thing is just so ridiculous to get to. The ground slopes away immediately from the house rendering my 24 foot ladder useless. Renting a lift just for this seemed excessive and, if I'm being honest, it looked like this when we first bought the place so I figured it really wasn't going anywhere. I want to slap myself just for thinking those words.

You can see the bandsaw trail that clearly shows how the craftsman constructed this overlay.
The detail is amazing. You can also see the years and years of lead paint that was thrown at this thing.

For years I thought the design of this bracket was made as a plywood overlay onto a solid board. One can clearly see the overlay line from the ground. And I was right about half of it, it is an intricately cut overlay, but it's cut from a solid sheet of pine board. Apparently they hadn't discovered plywood as a building material in St. Albans ca. 1898. Perhaps back then it was easier to find boards like this. Can't imagine doing so now.

Fixing up the facade of the house meant finally giving attention to, what should have been, a really cool design element to our house. After weeks of contemplation I finally reached out to my dad who I seemed to remember owning his own staging. I drove down to pick it up one day and then set about putting it together. Due to the nature and slope of the front lawn I had blocking under 3 of the wheels AND had to set this up over a bush. It was not easy and made me feel better about not acting on this project until now. It was amazing to finally be able to lay hands on the bracket. Of course, when I did, parts of it fell off in my hand. I was toying with the idea of recreating an entire new piece but as I chipped and scraped and sanded I realized that the only things needing replacing were some of the suns rays. They were hopelessly curled, shrunken and broken. I carefully removed them so that I could use them as templates and began work on the main part of the bracket. This included sanding, wood filling and two coats of exterior oil based primer.

After the oil primer I applied a few coats of the latex.
It's easier to do the inside without the sun rays in the way.

The original rays are above and the new ones are below.
It was many trips up the ladder as I tried to get these to fit perfectly.

Placing in the last salvaged pieces to check for fitment.
These were then installed with wood glue, oil primer and then latex paint.

I cut the new pieces a little bigger and a little longer than the originals figuring I can always take off more but I can't add any on. I wanted to make sure these fit perfectly and knowing the amount of degrading, curling and shrinking that happened over the years I wanted to play it safe. That meant quite a few trips up the staging and ladder with a pencil to make marks in order to determine where to make cuts and how much to trim. All in all I think it came out pretty well and, from the ground, you really can't tell anything went on up there other than to notice that this exigent detail on my house had now gotten some long overdue attention.