The DECK - Part 5: Not done yet...

I'm going to own up to the fact right now... we haven't finished the arbor/trellis yet because it is really, really HOT around here these days and motivation is really hard to come by when you are faced with near life threatening heat vs. staying inside and waiting for cooler weather.  Don't judge us.

But of course we didn't stay inside, that would be silly.  We just relocated to the garage with fans set up and built ourselves a lovely outdoor dining table from the cedar left over from building the deck.

Backstory.  John is a math teacher.  Thus, he is the go to guy around here for figuring out how much of whatever material we need for projects.  At least once a week I'm asking "how many feet is XX inches" and he just knows.  Impressive.  However, I'm pretty sure that Sam and Will would also just know, so without taking anything away from my wonderful family, I think I'm just not as quick with the math as they are and since someone is usually around to answer my questions I fill my brain with other stuff.

Learned helplessness.  Try it sometime.

Moving on.


Needless to say, John figured out how much decking to buy.  And wouldn't you know it, he was off by just ONE board.  And, it was an extra board so we could take it back and get some $$.   But what to do with all the extra cut off pieces?  Why, build a table of course.

Here is how it went down.

First we figured out how big we could make it with what was leftover.

It's 3.5' x 8.5' 

Then we ripped down some salvage from the old deck
for the skirting part of the frame.

Then we added more reclaimed wood for
the internal structure.

FYI - This is the underside of the table. 

Then we added legs and cross support along the bottom,
which also acts as a wonderful footrest.

After we squared it up, we added 3 of the 4
 side pieces for easy assembly.

This also eliminated the surprise factor at the end
of the middle pieces not being the right size, etc..

Then we cut and attached the middle pieces,
then attached the final side piece and...

IT'S DONE!!

And, because I'm a dork, here is the view from our dining table inside...

A few notes about the project...

We saved part of the original deck for projects like this.  Then we started to imagine ourselves outside eating at the table.  The reclaimed wood was all grooved up and dirty/mossy it just felt disgusting.  We figured we'd have to spend hours sanding it so it didn't feel gross and then it would look just like the new stuff we already had left over.  So we compromised and decided on new stuff for the top because it feels SO much cleaner. 

Although we still used the reclaimed for the structure, we're going to seal it when we seal the top of the table.  Our plan is to do that when we seal the decking.  However, weeks of 90+ degrees in the forcast means that isn't happening anytime soon :( 

It is already more weathered than the newer stuff and looks trendy-rustic.  That is a term.  One that I just made up.

We built it so large because the deck is so freaking big.  Our existing table was a smaller, square table (2.5' x 2.5') and looked really small on the new deck.  Now we can seat 6 adults comfortably and easily get twice as many around the table if needed :)

I would estimate that it took about 6 hours to build give or take.  

Here's the budget breakdown...

$12 for more cedar.  Unfortunately, the reason we had the 2 longer pieces for the sides was because we couldn't use them on the deck because they were too warped/crooked.  We forgot about that until we tried to square the table and found it impossible.  So we had to go and buy another piece for the longer sides.  Which was very ironic because we had just returned a piece that would have done the job 2 days earlier...  

$7 for screws

$5 for shims/glue

So for less than $25 we've got a 3.5' x 8.5' outdoor dining table.  Score.

Adding some curb swagg

So, it's Sunday - perfect day for a mailbox makeover!

This was a super simple project that took less than 20 minutes (not counting drying time for paint/stain) and makes a huge difference.

Let's just pretend that I actually took a photo of the mailbox before.  It was a standard green box atop a pressure treated post.  Something like this:

Imagine the green box instead of the black one and you've got it!

Anyhoo, I thought it looked a little sad and knew I could do better.

And then I did.

This angle is a little dark, so let's move to the other side, shall we? 

Yay!  It looks really classy now.

Big ups for easy projects.

The smudge is where I blurred out the address
somehow that felt like the thing to do...

All I did was use our nifty exterior stain to stain the pressure treated post (10 minutes) and spray painted the box (5 minutes).  Total cost:  $2 for the spray paint.

Yah, I know this isn't very exciting, but we still haven't built the arbor above the deck (didn't feel like spending the $$ and time this weekend) so there isn't a final post for the deck.

And as pathetic as this is, I haven't felt like cleaning the master bedroom enough to take photos for an after post there either.  That blue tub and yellow shower combo room takes a whole lot of motivation to clean since I hate it so much.  We'll have to have a party soon since that seems to be the only thing that motivates me to clean it :)

Maybe I'll just take photos around the shower room.  All artistic like.  Yeah, that's what I'll do.  It'll be good to cross that room off my "to blog about" list for awhile.  Plus, then I can tell you about our master bedroom, that's done now too.

Am I the only one who procrastinates cleaning something that I don't like?  I hope not, that would make me feel even worse... 

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.

A little side project

Our house is mostly brick with little bits of wood siding thrown in for flava.  Those little bits of siding have seen no love baby, none.

Behold...

So before we went to work on the deck floor, we thought we should address these so we wouldn't drip on the new! improved!! decking.  

We wanted to match the paint around the window frames pretty closely because I didn't think another color was needed since the brick has approximately 300 colors in it - and I thought it would look pretty cool.  So while we were at Menards one day I grabbed samples from the exterior window department in brown and matched the color pretty closely with Pittsburgh Paints ULTRA Deck, Fence & Siding Stain- Solid in Oxford Brown (a ready mix color - Woo! no waiting).  

Once again, stain does the trick for us.  Before we moved here, I would've just gone out and bought a couple of gallons of paint and slapped it on.  No more my friends, if the wood has not been painted previously, it's a gettin' stained!

It goes so fast and looks so nice when it's done.  The back of the house took about an hour and a half.  That's only because we had to move the ladder so many times.  So easy.

AFTERS...

Looks brand new, doesn't it?

And yes, I know it isn't the same window... 

Here's a side view so you can see how it looks as a whole....

And now a sneak peek of the next DECK installment - Redecking (finally!) and Railings...

Notice the siding!

This project was so easy, we took an hour to stain the front of the house above the garage as well.

BEFORE 

And AFTER

The rising sun makes this shot difficult.

But also a bit magical, don't you think? 

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!!

The Master Bathroom Chronicles: Part 3 - Paint & Lighting

I've done it again.  Mixed my own paint color.  This started innocently enough.  You see, we've been buying paint by the 5 gallon bucket load around here.  Here's the catch.  It's from Wal-Mart.  Yup.  Did you know they sell 5 gallons of flat interior paint for $38?  Yup.  That's a little more than $7 a gallon for the math-challenged among you.  We use this paint for primer coats only though.  We don't have major patching projects or stains on the wall that primer would be a better option for, we just have walls that have been stripped of wallpaper and scrubbed clean.  The wallpaper installers did prime the walls before installation (thank goodness!), so we just slap another coat of flat interior paint right on top for a newer, fresher primer coat.

Well Wal-Mart must've figured us out because it seems that they are not stocking very much (if any) of their $38 buckets.  So this time we bought a $42 dollar bucket of "Country White" instead of the $38 "White".  So what, it's a primer coat right?  But when we got it up on the walls, it kind of looked nice with all of the yellow tile in the room, so we thought we were just going to put another coat of the Country White up and call it done.  But then I had to go and get fancy and paint the trim and cabinets white, and then even fancier and paint the trim around the mirrors a nice soft grey.  So the Country White no longer kind of looked nice, it looked sad and pathetic (I would even go as far to say it looked like some really cheap off white Wal-Mart color).  So we needed a new paint color...

No problem.  I just mixed some of the soft grey (a mistint form ACE) with the country white from Wal-Mart and a touch of white and voila - Anne #6.  There is absolutely nothing remarkable about this color.  It just looks really soft and nice and was free.  We have a full scale redo on the list for this room, so I saw no reason to obsess about paint since we were just doing mini makeover and wanted something fresher and lighter that didn't involve vertical striped wallpaper.

Last chance to see the wallpaper

We lived that nightmare for 8 and 1/2 months people!  Gah.  

Here is a little teaser of the after

Remember I took this picture and then dropped the camera?

So this is the only picture I have of the walls until
I can clean up the bathroom a bit.

Anyhoo, on to the lighting...

We had the hollywood vanity lights (which were wallpapered, natch) that we hated.  We took them down and tried to spray paint them so they would blend into and/or compliment the wall.  But, we didn't strip all the glue residue off of them first and it looked horrendous.  So, I spent ONE HOUR scrubbing the glue residue off of the lights and it wasn't until 59 MINUTES into that hour that I had the brilliant idea of covering the face plate portion of the light that was previously wallpapered, and then spray painted, and then scrubbed clean - with fabric.  Therefore I spent ONE HOUR scrubbing something that I was going to turn around and RECOVER with fabric.  Waste. Of. Time.  

Moving on....

We decided on burlap because it's cheap and easy.  Here's how I covered the lights.  Which, by the way, only took about 20 MINUTES for all 3 lights.

The naked light, the cover was being scrubbed clean at that point, I believe :)

Also, notice the wall paint and mirror trim.  It's different!

Also, notice the clutter in the mirror.

Here is how easy this was.

I bought the burlap (this took the longest)
I cut the burlap to size.
Then, I used spray adhesive to stick it to the faceplate.
Then I cut out the circles so the lightbulbs would fit through.
Done. 

AFTER:  Not earth-shattering, but better.

AFTER:  Because I know that you wanted to know what the
light looks like when it's turned on... 

The entire project cost $4.50 for the paint and burlap.  Oh, and an hour and 20 minutes of my time not counting the trip to the store to purchase the burlap.  

I figure this is way better than buying 3 cheap, temporary vanity lights that we'd hate and kick ourselves daily for spending the money.  Mission accomplished.

Next up, before and afters...