A ton of work, an ounce of progress.
Continuing the saga of the backyard deck…
This past weekend was spent buying materials, and returning materials and then buying some again. Driving all over town to get said materials, along with finding some repairs to make to the house while we were prepping, made it a weekend without much visible progress.
We started Saturday morning heading out to the lumber yard to pick up some treated wood for the frame of the deck. If couldn’t tell from the previous posts, this deck will outlast most of the structures on the North American continent. We ended up getting a lot of wood. All of it very heavy, being treated as it was. We rented a trailer to get this home as there were 25 16 foot 2x10s, 6 12 foot 6×6 posts and 2 20 foot 2x10s (for the stair stringers).
I figure this was about 60 lbs or so per 16 ft 2 x 10 and 120 for the 6x6 12 footers plus a few others = about 3000 lbs of wood.
We got all of this wood loaded, home and unloaded. This took about 4 hours. (Note to self: next time have it delivered!)
Big, HEAVY 6x6 12ft posts spread across the backyard.
Once we had materials on hand, we set about pulling off some of the siding where the deck would attach to the house. We figured we’d pull off the siding, add some sheathing that was missing, put down some felt as a moisture barrier and get to building right away. But, no.
We pulled off the siding and found a mess. The framing was all crooked, rotting and not even nailed into the house structure in most places. We salvaged what we could, but end up pulling a lot of it off and having to rebuild it. It wasn’t difficult or particularly tricky, but it just took a bunch of time cutting 2x4s to size and building out the framing.
We managed to keep one and a half sections. And the one full section we kept was a bit screwy so we shored that up with more lumber.
All better now. And straight!
Adding some felt for a bit of moisture protection.
Once that was all done, it was a simple matter of putting up the posts and cutting them to the right height. Great, we would finally get some vertical building! But, no.
Apparently, the heat got to me. Somewhere in my head I was convinced that 8ft 6×6 posts would be tall enough for the part of the deck next to the house. So we bought 8ft 6x6s for those 5 posts and 12ft 6x6s for the posts running down the side of the deck away from the house. Turns out I was wrong about the 8ft posts working next to the house. We needed at least 9ft posts. So, without thinking, we tossed the 8ft posts into the back of my little truck and went to Home Depot to switch them out for 12ft posts.
We got to Home Depot, returned the 8fts, grabbed the loooong 12fts and head to the saw area so they can cut them to a length that could fit into the truck. As we were pushing them over there, a friendly man in an orange apron asks, “Are you the guys that returned the 8ft posts? How do you measure something like that wrong?”
He’s lucky I was exhausted and dehydrated at that point from spending 6 hours in the 102 degree heat. Especially after we pushed these mammoth posts over to the saw only to have him say, “Ayup, we can’t cut those… Saw ain’t big enough.”
Really.
Fine. I was going to get these home and build something today. And I was going to do it while I grumbled about the Home Depot ‘helper’ the entire drive home. The only problem is that these posts are huge. The bed of my truck is 6 ft long. These are 12 ft posts and heavy as heck (have I mentioned how heavy these things are?). We did the best we could and crossed our fingers the whole way home.
Safety first - as you can see we did use the red flags, so we had nothing to worry about.
As I had hoped, getting the posts up and cut to length went pretty quickly. I fashioned a mount for my laser level after we cut the first post to the right length and then just shot a beam to the rest of the posts making it easy to mark and cut them exactly right.
Laser Beam! Technology can be a great thing. Except when you accidentally look at the beam. Then it just hurts.
Once the posts were up, we cut a bunch of the 2x10s up to make a 3-ply beam. And except for the fact that our 2x10s had variations of over 1/2″ in width (arggg!), it went up pretty easily.
Beam me up, Scotty! Ok, ok, that was lame, but it was really nice to have a small part of the actual DECK going up.
The plan this weekend is to get the other beam up (runs parallel to this one) and add in the joists so we will have the skeleton of the deck done!
Here’s my latest sketch-up for the deck frame:
Design in progress. Frame should look like this, but I'm still figuring out the stairs and railings.
Tags: backyard, deck, DIY, framing, homeowner, photo, project