Creative restoration is what I call it. In restoring, strive for authenticity where it counts; otherwise get as close as you can using your imagination and budget. That's how I'm restoring my 1914 American Foursquare including its porch. My porch took a little bit of creativity for the rails, gingerbread, and brackets. I ended up with an eclectic mix of styles mostly Victorian. This is fine for my house which has most elements from the Victorian era. My kitchen, butler's pantry, entryway to the living room and second hallway are about to get Victorian trim, columns to replace the ones taken out, doors and all the woodwork from a farmhouse that's being torn down 100 miles west of here. All this original trim had been taken out of my house in favor of 1970s paneling and the farmhouse woodwork is priced cheaper than having reproductions made. It's a very close match. My house is not a distinct foursquare either as its roof is not a pyramid but is gabled with a dormer. Being built in 1914 but having Victorian elements inside puts my house on the cusp to go either Victorian or to a later Edwardian style. Looking at Arts and Crafts wallpaper just doesn't fit and earlier Victorian feels and goes better.
The only clues for starting the reconstruction of my porch was the ceiling's beadboard, remaining trim on the inside of my house and speculation on what the original owner would have done. There are half a dozen Foursquares in my neighborhood that are the same layout. None have the original porches which could mean the porches were of a poor design to start with, or have been lost to the forces of time and weather.
The porch has been through at least three large renovations and only the ceiling and part of the roof are original. I think it's original because the solid oak is cut in true dimensions unlike today's 1-inch boards measuring ¾ of an inch. Over the door are small dentils which were popular in Greek revival houses, however, my front door has a transom window, which was popular in the Victorian era. In my neighborhood, these two styles co-existed for about the first decade of this century. 
The prior owners told me there were shadows from columns on the porch floor before they gutted it and moved the stairs to the side and underneath the roof. (Having the stairs under the roof protects them and keeps them from getting ice build up in the winter. I left them there.) At one point the porch had limestone slabs which were left broken in two and scattered about my front yard. I imagine the slabs were used similarly to the house next to mine where the slabs lay on top of thick brick walls located on each side of the stairs. The house next to mine, which is a duplicate built two years earlier, doesn't have the original porch. Its porch bricks have cleaner lines and don't match the house's worn brick foundation. It also has white tiles set into the top of the brick columns. White tiles made an appearance in the 1920s around here.
So what would the original owner have done? Belle Stenger, a schoolteacher according to the 1914 city directory, inherited the lot from her father, John Sharp, when he died in 1910. She took out a 3-year $2,000 mortgage and built the house. There were only a few houses in the neighborhood at that time. The first was built in 1902 which was the year Lydia Bradley sold the original 160 acres in a carnival atmosphere to raise $135,400 to build Bradley Polytechnic Institute. My neighborhood, The Uplands, was supposed to be the creme de la creme in houses. Some of the houses have elevators and one has a built-in pool. My house is in the skilled working-class section. 
Its second long-term owner in the 40s was an electrician. There's a possible scenario that could have given Stenger the resources to build my house. As a schoolteacher, she probably didn't make a lot of money and probably didn't have a lot to spare with her four children and no husband. But, after she died in 1934, the house sold for $4,000 in 1941; double her $2,000 mortgage.
That leads me to believe she had other financial resources not mentioned in the abstracts and not included in her mortgage papers. Perhaps she also inherited cash from her father. I think she would have had to spend a little bit more than $2,000 ($32,500 in 1998 dollars) to build my 2,500-square-foot house because the remaining trim on the inside is huge and of quarter-sawn and tiger-striped oak. My baseboards are 10 inches high, two of three linen closets have built-in cabinets, as does the butler's pantry, and the dining room has massive pocket doors. I also have rosettes in my attic dormer, which is the maid's room, and my door trim matches trim found in many turn of the century houses around here. My house was also built with gas, electricity and gravity-fed forced-air heat.
An argument to this would be that she didn't have much financial resources. The Victorian trim could have been left over at the builder's warehouse so it was cheaper by the time Stenger built her house. The house's hardware is a mix and match of ornate and plain Victorian.
With extra resources, she could have built the porch to be as elaborate as the inside of the house. I think she would have put up gingerbread and decorative brackets. Though my house was built in the Edwardian Era, only the rich adopted current trends as they happened here. The middle class in Peoria, IL, adopted things very slowly. The world moved much slower back then too.
Gingerbread was very popular in the 1890s Queen Anne, Princess Anne and Italianates. There are a few middle-class versions within blocks of my neighborhood and grander versions a few blocks over on High Street, where Peoria's wealthy distillers built their mansions. (Hiram Walker was one of them.)
Middle-class gingerbread and brackets are simple in design. The gingerbread is mostly square spindles that look like a ladder on its side nailed to the porch ceiling and some have turned spindles alternating with the square ones. The brackets are just as elaborate as the richer class houses.
For my gingerbread, I alternated turned spindles with square ones mainly because I got a deal on the turned spindles; 50 cents apiece, and there were only 25 of them. Stenger with her same financial resources would have done this too, I think. I alternated those on the front of the porch and over the stairs. For my brackets I created a swan with a heart on its back. They cost $4 apiece in red oak and I cut them out with a scroll saw. Victorian brackets in the store start at $10 for pine. I chose a swan because that's the logo of my small business, which is what's funding my restoration. I'm using the swan as a motif throughout my house so it will help tie in every room where no evidence of the original exists. 
I altered the swan to fit as a bracket and it just turned out that it looks rather Art Nouveau, which was a housing style led by Will Bradley from around 1895 through
the 1920s. I bought my porch rails for $60 from the estate auction of Gretta Alexander, a psychic to the stars in Delevan, IL. I think they are originally from her Italianate house and she just kept them in a barn after she remodeled. The railings look like many others in my neighborhood. The columns are cedar 1 by 8 wrapped around 5x5 oak posts and the gingerbread is oak. These are rot-resistant woods. The spindles are hemlock.
As I was running out to the store one day while I was putting all this up, I noticed the houses on the next street over were having a lot of construction done to them. All the contractors had their signs posted out front; C.A. Gabert Construction, and Kitchen Cabinets by so and so. So I put up my own sign in magic marker: Lilley Construction, a division of D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself).
Fretworks International
The Victorian Gingerbread Page
