A hundred years of water had turned the corner of this Hopewell, NJ porch into soggy cornflakes. The owner wanted to shore up the structural issues but avoid an expensive complete porch replacement if possible. So with a surgeon's mentality I removed rotten wood and scarfed in new material as needed. I also demolished the cracked masonry pier, building a new one in its place.
Natural building techniques used:
JOISTS: No pressure treated lumber. I treated the joists myself in a kiln (built by myself and my then 7 year old son) with an ancient, chemical-free, Japanese wood-preservation technique called yakisugi (often incorrectly referred to in the US as "shou sugi ban"), where wood is burnt/carbonized in fire, protecting it from both moisture and pests. The fire for the kiln was lit with an ember produced from a bow-drill kit (ancestral friction fire technique - no matches necessary), gleefully blown into flame by my son.
COLUMN: The original porch column could've been trashed, but instead it was rebuilt. It was hollow like a drinking straw, with a large cylindrical cavity running up its entire length. Because it was soft at both the top and bottom, I filled the cylindrical cavity with long custom dowels made from cypress (an intrinsically rot-resistant species), fortifying the column from within. I amputated the rotten foot from the bottom of the column and replaced it with a custom cypress block - also hollowed - so that a dowel could mate the block to the column (along with screws and glue).