Roadside Mysteries

Here’s the situation:

The back yard as of June 24, 2010

It’s been almost two years and we put up with this crummy cement slab porch long enough! It’s time to put in a deck! Of course we had to re-route the sprinkler system and move some loose stones (where you see the bare earth in the picture above).

Truck delivering the goods

We decided on using Trek® composite for the deck boards and treated lumber for the support. There was a sale on an appropriate color of Trek® at the local Home Depot and now we have it.

Building materials sitting in our driveway!

OK. I build banjos and Magic Agogo Belts and I did a few home improvements over the years, but I’ve never attempted something this big. I now have all this crap in my driveway and I better do something with it soon or the HOA will start sending me nasty letters! What we have here is a lot of heavy lifting: From left to right we have 52 Deck Blocks, assorted 12 foot long 2×6 and 4×4 treated lumber and finally 53 12 foot long composite boards. Thanks to everyone who came out to help lift and carry and put things into place!

The supports are in!

It didn’t take long to get this started. It’s really just a simple 12×24 deck about 24 inches off the ground. How hard could that be?

Oops, a design change in the middle of the project!

Jeanne would like a bench on the south side of the deck. I decided to include a semi-cantilevered bench design held together with lag bolts top and bottom.  It sure seems strong enough… One good drunken party will tell!

Are we done yet?

The final part was getting the composite boards screwed into the supports. It took at least a week of screwing around to get that done!

The deck furniture and grill now fits!

…with room to spare for the gazebo and hot tub! But there’s no time to do that right now. I’ve got to prepare for the annual feast of the Ragbrai and my hands are a mess from drilling in all those deck screws. Lots of banjo playing is in order for the next few days!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 at 9:17 am and is filed under Home Improvement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.