Finally - we get to lay the new decking. So I don't forget, here is what led up to this magic moment...
Remove trellis - easy. Although the 2" x 8" boards did snap in half.
Remove railing - super easy. A sledgehammer and 20 minutes and they were gone.
Remove old posts - easy? They broke in half when we wiggled them.
Remove old decking - super tedious and frustrating. The boards were nailed and shattered into pieces when we tried prying them off the joists.
Now the unexpected joys of home improvement...
Wood rot - we removed the sistered boards that were not structural
and got lucky the structural ones were solid.
Ants! - ditto with removing the non-essential boards and got those
suckers sprayed to oblivion.
Replace posts - check.
Replace spongy joists - Yup.
Replace skirting boards - done.
Replace entire support structure of deck - oh yeah!
After 2 weeks of really hard work every evening and weekend (with last days of school activities and 2 parties thrown in), we're finally ready to lay down some cedar. Here we go...
(Yea, so I didn't take pictures because all we did was use a speed square with the screw placement marked on it to keep the boards in line and the screws the same distance apart for looks)
Some after the work is done for the day, but still in progress pictures...
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Yay! Progress after Day 2 See how cool the siding looks? |
I'll go all Steve Martin in "The Jerk" on you and say the first day was like a 1/2 day and the second day was like 1 1/2 days, but we had to stop early because we were having people over for dinner, so the second day was really the third day, but only the second full day, so yea, I can't really remember the sequencing, but I can tell you I was super duper excited when this much was done.
Then this happened the next morning.
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Done! Steps are next, after the railings of course :) |
So, railings...
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John did this super helpful mock-up so we'd see what we were getting. We liked it so we moved ahead. P.S. doesn't the lawn look wonderful? |
We decided on the aluminum spindles. We think they look updated and modern, but not mod. Plus when you go to seal the deck, you've saved yourself hours of scrubbing wood spindles and resealing them. I will spend those hours drinking wine on my deck.
To make the railings for the spindles, we made a jig using a scrap piece of decking. Code in our area is 6" and the decking is less than that (5 3/4"??), so we knew we'd be ok. So we marked each pair of railings and used the drill press to make the holes to hold the spindles.
Again, no pictures. Gah. There is one on John's phone, but not too exciting. But I did take a picture of the jig...
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Here are the problems we ran across that delayed the finished project.
The railing panel segments between the posts are different lengths, so the spacing wasn't equal from segment to segment so we had to custom measure some or else the spacing would look all wrong from one panel to the next. Job done. Just took some extra math and time.
We got all drill press happy and drilled too many boards, so when the spacing wasn't exactly right, we'd endangered ourselves into running out of boards, but then remembered that a rail cap was going on top so we could just flip the board over and start again.
The drill press preset wasn't drilling to the right depth so the railings weren't coming out the same height. So we ditched the preset and John eyeballed it and you can't tell the difference.
All in all, the railings took a couple of evenings. We took our time and thought about the problems instead of just powering through and am so glad we did. It looks so nice.
Here you go...
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Making progress. |
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And done. |
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Can you believe it? The next time you see this view, there will be caps on the railings, the posts will be cut off properly and the trellis will be done Plus, notice I stained the skirting to match the siding I'm clever that way. |
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Yeah, steps are next. John is working on them right now. |
Next update, steps and the trellis.
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