Anybody Built Their Own Porch?

This is our porch. And i can't lie Tracy tells me we only did from the top of the window up and the window.

 

We had some cracking in a house we owned that was very similar to that. Fixed it by buying some steel reinforcement rods (came in a kit). Just had to use an angle grinder to dig out the mortar in channels deep enough for the rods to be placed in and then re-mortar. The rods just add support to the wall so you can fix the actual cracking without it happening again. Only took me and my father-in-law a few hours to do (neither of us are builders) and I think the kit was about £50ish.

 

I bulit a porch on our first house back in the 70's. Had to get planning permission. The key thing they wanted covered was how I going to deal with the rain water and the ground work piping to get it to the nearest manhole. Other than this it was all fairly straight forward from what I can remember...