The Deck

Warning: This may be one of those boring "how I built something" posts, but I thought family members might want to see how our home improvements are coming along.

In a prior post, you learned of my new talent as an excavator. You will recall that I rented a skid loader and removed dirt in the area of our old flower bed, to the east of our new sunporch. The goal was to prepare the area for pouring footings for the deck we want to build in that area as an extension of the sunporch.

The first step was relocation of the over-100-years-old peony that occupied the corner where the garage and sunporch now meet. We actually did that by scooping up the entire plant with the skid loader and then placing it down further south at the corner of the new sunporch. It may be sitting up a little too high, since there is some grading that needs to be done, but so far, it looks like it is doing OK. We salvaged and moved a few other plants too.

First, there was lots of measuring and leveling and more measuring and leveling and setting up stakes to mark things and running strings between various points to make sure that everything was going to line up. The next step involved digging the holes for the concrete piers for the deck. I dug four holes by hand, each one being 48" deep and a bit more than 12" in diameter. You can see them here. This was the hardest part of the job!!

Each hole received a sleeve that helped to control the amount of concrete needing to be mixed as well as marking the exact required top of each pier.

After mixing much concrete and filling each of the four sleeves, metal anchors were inserted into the top of each pier. A beam sits atop the piers, and the anchors are used to tie that beam down to the piers. Kathie then helped me attach a ledger to the house. This is the board to which the joists are attached. The outer end of each joist rests on the beam that sits on the piers. Kathie helped me manufacture the beam from a number of lengths of 2x8 lumber. Here you can see the ledger and the beam in place. We then backfilled some of the dirt to create a slope under the deck so that rain water will drain away from the garage and sunporch toward the yard. This backfill is covered with plastic, and about 2" of pea gravel has been distributed over it.

Yesterday, I started installing joists. Here are the first several of them. You can finally begin to imagine the deck outline. The deck surface will be about 24' by 10' 6". There will be some benches at the east end to dress up the deck and to provide some seating.

This morning, before the rain began, Kathie helped me finish installing the rest of the joists and the skirt board which covers the ends of the joists. We also put the rest of the pea gravel in place. Here is what the final layout looks like. Next, we will be installing deck boards. More later.