One of my big projects to complete before the spring was the deck. If you remember when we bought the house, the previous owners had removed the back sliding door and put in a fake propane fireplace. When I remodeled, I took out the fireplace and put a new back door back in. We love to eat outside when the weather is warm so I knew we were going to need a deck. This one presented a new kind of challenge for me though. Our house is not built very high above ground level and behind our house there is a slight rise. Outside our back door it is a 16 inch drop to the ground but at the far edge of the deck it was only going to be 4 inches off the ground. The best solution would have been to pour a concrete slab or put in a nice rock patio. But those are a lot more expensive and a lot more permanent (in case we ended up not liking it) than a wood deck. So, we went with the wood deck. Whenever this deck needs to be replaced in many years, we might look at one of the other options.
What I ended up having to do since we were going to do a deck, was to dig out a lot of dirt for the joists and joist supports. It was a lot of work and not any fun. In fact it may be one of my least favorite projects I have done in a long time. One of the bonuses of doing a deck though is I was able to make it level going out the back door so there is no step down and that is nice. And because of the incline of the land, I am only going to have to put a step off the deck on one side. I ended up building it 22' wide x 16' deep. Which turned out to be perfect once we got our stuff up there.
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| Getting started |
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| Clara was VERY helpful |
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| Esther was really into it and actually was helpful at times. She would hand me screws when I was putting on the decking. Which I remember always being my job when I was little...handing dad nails. |
I did let Esther run the drill a couple times with me to put in some screws (pay no attention to the thinning hair)
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| In progress |
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| Finished |
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| Added a little wheelchair ramp so we were ADA compliant |
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| With our stuff |
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