The DECK - Part 6: Done!

Whew.  It's over.

There was a short break of the 95+ weather (only high 80s) for a couple of days and we pounced on it.   In the last 3 days we've:  built the arbor/trellis, scrubbed and sealed the deck.  And that, my friends, means we are done.  This time really done too, no little lingering tidbit (*cough* skirting *cough*).

The arbor/trellis took a little while longer than we thought, here's why.  Indecision.  We got hung up on how to attach the support girder boards without extra hands, a little stuck on the spacing of the boards, and finally which board was the best looking and where to put each board to maximize its beauty or minimize its faults.  You know, just stuff that when you add it up makes stuff more frustrating than it should be.  But that's home improvement, you snipe at each other and mutter under your breath, put your head down and work, and then before you know it you have a lovely arbor above your head :)

Problem #1:  attaching the support (girder) boards

We thought it was going to be really hard to hold up the 2 support (girder?) boards and attach them to the posts.  But it wasn't.  John is such a master of measuring twice and cutting once that these went up relatively easy.  But then we ran out of washers for the lag bolts.  And then I realized that the zinc ones we already used may bleed and make the cedar posts look bad, so then we had to drive all the way to Menards to get stainless steel washers, and then we had to come home and take out the bolts we already attached and replace the zinc washers with stainless.  Yada, yada, yada...  it sucked, but we (mostly John) got it done and we were ready to move on.

Yay! 

Let's just say John wasn't too happy with my "help" at this point.  Then it got worse...

Problem #2:  how to space the overhead boards evenly.

Originally there were 16 overhead boards.  We'd scaled down the size of the arbor a bit and figured 12 overhead boards would be about right so it wouldn't feel claustrophobic out there.  Then we pondered how to space the boards so they looked right attached to the house and overhead.  In a moment of "why is this so hard", I walked over and said "3 boards here, 5 here & 3 here" and then we stepped back and realized that yes, 11 boards are better than 12 and that was the perfect spacing.   So we sanded the boards and were ready to attach them to the house.

Finally ready for action.

But wait...

Problem #3:  which board goes where

We are finally ready to attach the overhead boards to the ledger board on the house.  And John was ready to lock me inside.

Side note:  the ledger board was another time sucker - me and my "how much overhang is this side going to have vs. the other side" and "shouldn't these boards be the same length on each side" and "that board is kind of ugly isn't it?" bullshit.  John was so patient with me, I know he wanted me to go inside and leave him alone and I think he only said that out loud once :)

However, my bullshit continued.  I went outside to help with the first board and wouldn't you know it, it was really ugly and I didn't want it right over our heads so we'd have to look at it every time we were sitting at the table and asked John if we could use another board.

Now John doesn't get mad that easily.  And certainly doesn't show it when he does. This particular situation comes as close to John getting mad as you are going to get.  I knew he was about ready to lose it, but I stuck to my guns and hoped he would understand that I didn't want to do all this work and then step back and be sad that we didn't take the extra 10 minutes to figure out which board went where so we weren't looking at crap for the next 30 years.  That's all.  I walked away for a moment and he got a nice cold glass of tea and we were able to move on and attach the boards.  And they are perfect.

Here ya go..

See the left side?  That's where I didn't want the extra amount of
ledger board just floating out there with nothing attached to it.

Maybe you need to see it in person, but I'm right. 

Anyhoo, here's a nice before and after comparison.

Before

After 

So beautiful.

Not sealed yet.
That's next.

Now cleaning and sealing the deck certainly are not difficult tasks, just really time consuming.  We cleaned the deck boards and sealed the arbor on a Tuesday evening, and sealed the deck boards and steps Wednesday evening.  And Thursday morning we woke up to this beauty.

Here's before.

 

During. 

And DONE.

There are no words.

Just relief. 

Before.

Wow, just wow. 

During.

Those were some dark days.

Kidding, but looking back they kind of were. 

And after.

It's breathtaking.
To us at least.
 

Now since this is the final (and longest) post about the deck, here's the budget breakdown...

Decking:  $1930.07

Arbor lumber:  $359.46

Other lumber (this includes new joists/supports and steps): $1069.96

Hardware (screws, joist supports, misc):  $414.91

Spindles:  $157.41

Rolloff:  $153.43

Cleaner/sealer:  $82.20

GRAND TOTAL:  $4167.44 

Not bad for a 500+ sq. ft cedar deck with a new arbor and steps.  We'd budgeted 5K, so we're in the black baby!!

Actually, we have one can of sealer to take back so you can really subtract about $25 from that total.  But I'm sure we spent that much and more on extra beer and takeout so I'll call it even.  

Throughout the entire process I was terrified that someone was going to need a trip to the ER.  At this point, I think I can safely say that the danger portion of the deck is finished and not one injury to report.  We had many splinters and jammed fingers, but only one minor spill through the open joists (thankfully the portion of the deck that is only 2 feet above the ground, not the 12 foot high portion) which resulted in this beauty...

 

The DECK - Part 4: Stairs, wonderful stairs

It's the simple things I tell ya...

You know when you get used to not having something like - I don't know...stairs, and then all of a sudden - boom - you've got stairs it can be quite a shock.

Well consider me shocked to my core, because we now have stairs from our deck to our back patio.  I'll rewind a bit for you.  We moved in August of 2011 and knew the deck needed replacing but we could at least walk on the deck.  Not so much for the stairs, they were a dicey maneuver from day one.  And since we reset our patio in March, we haven't even had proper stairs, just a railroad tie (which was actually way more sturdy than the stairs we ripped out).  Ah, memories...

Railroad tie with some of the stair material nailed on top.

Classy.

But safer than the stairs that came with the house. 

Who knew stairs could be so complicated to build?  John.  I am so very naive about this stuff.  I figure just rip the old ones out and build new ones.  What?  2 hours tops in my book.  But John knew better.  Let's just say that the stairs took awhile, OK?  If I can ever get him to write a blog post, he can tell you himself, but since I rely on his word I'll just say that they were a challenge and we are extremely happy with the end result.

Here ya go...

First we had to rip the old stairs off the side of the house (the cat litter
bucket is sitting on them in the picture above).

And since the stairs were out of the way, we could
 finish the patio pavers all the way up to the house.
 

Then...

John used the old ledger board as a template for the new masonry screws and attached a new one.

This took FOR.EV.ER.  The masonry screws and expanders kept
malfunctioning and the board wasn't sitting tight.

John kept at it and finally the screws started to grab into the house.

John wins!!
  All kidding aside, this took a couple of hours.... 

Then he attached the stringers 

Then I stained the ledger board and stringers to match the skirting on the deck.

And right when we were ready to attach the stair treads, we realized that
there was no support for the corner since the patio doesn't go that
far underneath.

blerg.

John spent the next hour or so building support for the corner.
Then I stained that too. 

And finally...

Oh. My. God.

Who knew stairs could be such a luxury?

We kept going outside last evening to just look at them.   And walk up and down them.  And sit on them.  Did I mention they are extra wide?  They are,  14 1/2".  Nice and cosy to sit and have a beer in the evening.  I hope I can get used to them, I still hesitate when I get to them thinking that they are going to collapse if I step on them wrong.  

Here we are last fall...

 

...and here we are today.

Next (and FINAL) stage - the trellis.

See ya then. 

The DECK - Part 3: Redecking and Railings

Yay!

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...

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.

Done!

Steps are next, after the railings of course :) 

So, railings...

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...

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...

Making progress. 

And done.

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.
  

Yeah, steps are next.

John is working on them right now.

Next update, steps and the trellis.

The DECK - Part 2: Removing, Rebuilding & A PARTY!

Here is how naive we were.  We thought we could salvage most of the decking and reuse it for other projects such as outdoor tables and planter boxes.  You know, just have a nice neat pile of lovely weathered cedar to use when we felt like it to make cool things...

...then we started to take the boards off the joists.  As I mentioned before, they mostly shattered into hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces when we removed them.  Now what?

Dumpster, that's what.  Easy as pie.  We realized that removing shattering boards, pulling the nails left in them, and then storing them was a silly little pipe dream.  Pre-dumpster, we thought we'd take the unusable junk to the dump by the truckload.  Clearly we were delusional.  We called and got a 20 yard dumpster dropped in our driveway and promptly filled it in 2 days.   ADDED BONUS:  we were able to toss the remaining railroad ties from our retaining wall project that had been in front of our house since March.

We did save a little bit of decking.  Probably just enough to complete the projects we had imagined.

Unfortunately, there aren't any pictures of the dumpster.  But I think most of us can imagine a rusty yellow metal box filled with shards of 30 year old cedar and rusty nails, right?

Here are some other pictures of the demo process..

Where the support post was.

The lighter stuff in the middle is what is left of the support post after it broke. in. half.

It was at this point we realized that the support beam would need to be replaced.

Blerg. 

So the support beam...  Soul crushing.  We'd thought that we could save most of the deck structure and just lay new decking on top of that.  No way.  Those boards were like sponges, soft and squishy and when you touched them, water would seep out.  So off to Menards and after two exhausting days of rebuilding and reinstalling support beams for our 500 square foot, 12 foot high deck it was done.  No pictures of this process because we were pissed off and tired and needed both hands and both kids to help install those suckers.  

Moving on.  

The spongy joists.  We'd found ants! in the sistered boards that were installed for the decorative chevron pattern which we were ditching.  After we removed the infested boards and had the ants! treated we evaluated which boards needed to go.  There were about 6 or 8 (I can't remember - it's a blur) that we just didn't feel were safe to keep.  We pried them out of their hangers and recut and reinstalled new ones.  Notice how I can casually describe something that took an entire day like it was no big deal.  I guess after rebuilding the entire support structure for the deck, it really wasn't that big of a deal, just more time spent than we thought that's all :)

So I'll leave you with some more pictures.  They are a bit out of order, just like this project.  For days it felt more like a triage situation instead of an organized building project.  But we kept our eyes on the goal and put our heads down and went to work.  

Oh happy day!

New posts ready for action!!

We are slowly getting the last boards off the deck.

Plus, new!  improved!! skirting boards 

Here is where I need to thank Sam for some help.  In addition to assisting with the board removal, he - with his 15 year old indifference to/frustration with the project - discovered that if you hit the deck boards in the middle with a crowbar, they would break in half and then you could get leverage to pry them off.  

Thanks Sam!  You saved us time and helped us find a productive way to channel our increasing frustration with the project.  It was terribly satisfying to smash the crap out of those last boards and watch them disappear.

Those are literally the last 2 boards.
John was about 12 feet off the ground at this point.

But he was able to back into the house and get those last boards off!

I think he put his beer board a little too far away... I'm not sure how he could
reach his beer after he got inside the house :p

Side note.  The picture of John above was Wednesday night.  At dusk.  Here is the funny part.  We were having a party the next day RIGHT AFTER SCHOOL.  That meant that John went to work Thursday (last day of school - YAY!) and had just enough time between coming home from work and people arriving to ice the beer.  

So in the dark after an exhausting evening of board removal, we laid down unsecured planks of new decking and hoped that no one would want to be outside at the party.

Sigh.  What you don't see is all of the people BEHIND me standing on our "deck"!!

At least no one got hurt.  The only time people came inside was to refresh their drinks :)

  

The DECK - Part 1: What Were We Thinking?

So, The Deck.

Here's what we were thinking.

1.  Strip the old, somewhat deteriorating, decking off the joists.  Replace with new deck boards.

2.  Replace the trellis overhead.

3.  Replace the railings.

4.  Replace the stairs.

Here is what happened.

1.  We started to take the older boards off the joists and they were literally shattering into thousands of pieces in our hands.  Good thing we tackled this now huh?

2.  Ummm, that joist looks a little "soft".

3.  Ummm, those are definitely ants.  Carpenter ants.

4.  Should a support post break in two when you rock it back and forth to see if it's still attached?

You get the picture.  We were one incident shy of a catastrophe.  I think somewhere deep in our minds we knew that the deck was dangerous and that we needed to do something about it as soon as possible.  I'm so glad we did.  It was scary.

This is just a organizing post so I remember how far we've come and what it took to get there.  I can honestly say this is the largest, most intense, project John and I have ever attempted.  Nothing else can come close to this.

Here are some pictures of the chaos.

Isn't it pretty?  This was taken in October 2011.   

The closer you get, the scarier it gets huh?

See the patio?  What a disaster.

But you really can't see how bad the deck is from here,
let's move in closer... 

See the chevron pattern.  So on trend.

So stupid for exterior applications.

The builders had to use extra support for the seam on the chevron.

Water liked to go to there.

Ants like to live in moist, dark locales.

Our deck was paradise. 

This trellis is beautiful.  And will be replicated.

These boards broke in half when we moved them.
Just shattered in our hands.... 

This was a 16 foot post that was supporting the trellis.

It broke in half when I wiggled it to see
if there were still screws attached.

Also, note that it was about 1" smaller all the way
around and soaking wet where it was attached to the decking.

 Since we are almost finished attaching the deck boards, I wanted to start to chronicle the process before we forget how difficult and, at times, soul crushing the demo process was.  

Next up, removing and rebuilding!!