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With so many unfinished things to work on around the house… why not start another project?

Well, Lisa has been coveting a deck for some time, and the weather has been nice lately.  Plus, we have the help handy now that Chris is living here.  So, here we go…

When we first moved in, there was a back door off the kitchen that had a kind of catwalk to the driveway.  It was partially collapsed, and demolishing it was one of the first things we did.

Here are the only photos we have from 2001.

The original back door of the house.

Retaining wall with steps to back door.

I wish I had taken more photos the first year, since the house was in an amazing state of disrepair.

These photos are from August 2002:

What a mess.

No more back door.

Anyway, I had been envisioning the deck for a while, so I did some drawings using a basic program called Smartdraw.  It only took a few hours.  Here is the result:

Deck elevation

Deck plan

Hole digging machine

Sonotubes in the ground

Where the deck will be

Not all the sonotubes are showing in the above photo.

I forgot to take photos the following weekend, when Jimbo and I mixed the concrete.  It took 40 80lb. bags of concrete mix to fill the eleven holes.  Good thing we have a mixer.

Week three, we started the carpentry.  The weather cooperated, and we got a lot done.  May not look like much here, but getting all these posts cut to the correct height, plumb, lined up, and the beams attached was a lot of work.

The post go up

Another view

The crew shows their spirit.

Chris and Jimbo

And the next day, we got all the joists installed.

Joists installed

Coming next weekend: posts and decking.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 3:38 am and is filed under Renovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.