Saturday, June 09, 2007

The Deck - Phase I

You may remember that we put a door in the back of the house where a bedroom window was originally. That necessitated building a porch to get down to the ground about four feet below. This seemed satisfactory for a year or so. And then the bride got the itch. "I want a deck," she said. So we started to dismantle the railings on the porch...
(don't forget you can click on the pics to make them bigger.)

...began to frame up a deck...


...and started laying the flooring. I decided to lay the flooring on a 45 degree angle so that it wouldn't look so much like an afterthought as it transitioned from the old porch structure. I think once it's all stained the same color it will look like it was always there.


Next step was to trim off all the uneven boards and start on the railing.

The bride picked out the style of railing she wanted, and it was up to me to figure out how to make it work...


I think it looks pretty good.

Now it's time to relax...

Uh oh, the bride has informed me that this is phase I of the deck construction. Phase II will be a lower level deck... sheesh, it never ends. Stay tuned.

3 comments:

Fred said...

Very nice deck work -- looks great. Question: did you dig out post footers underneath the concrete footers you put down? I've heard that if you don't, when the frost hits, the ground will freeze, expand, and push the deck up.

Fred@OneProjectCloser

Anonymous said...

good question and we thought about it. Being in the south where it doesn't freeze too badly and being fundamentally lazy, we opted for laying those bad boys right on the ground. I may pay the price for it sooner or later, but we took that gamble. Thanks for the nice words.

Fred said...

I usually opt for the laziest route possible myself :-) Sometimes it comes back to bite you .. sometimes you get lucky. Anyhow, the deck looks great - so here's hoping it stays that way :-)