Deck progress

Starting on Labor Day weekend, we started the real “visible” portion of the deck. Roger came all the way from Marshall and Joe came again from Roseville, so we were hoping to make quick work of it. The first step was to position and place the footing posts, then make the beams and place them on the posts. This was the challenging part as the deck needs to slope away from the house slightly so the outer beam needed to be lower than the inner beam and at a consistent rate.

Once the beams were in place, we built the enclosing joists around the outside. With those complete, we could hang the joists in the middle. It took us until mid-afternoon to get the joist box complete, but hanging the rest of the joists went really quickly and we were finished in just a few hours, including the support blocking.

The following weekend, my Dad came up from Milbank to help put the surface on the main framing area. We were disappointed to discover that an awful lot of the composite decking we had bought had been scratched in transit. Since I have been traveling for work during the week, I wasn’t able to check it out beforehand. Thankfully, we had just enough of the main decking to finish the main portion.

Getting the first board positioned correctly was a little tricky since we needed to start at the outer edge of the deck and ensure we were perfectly parallel to the house. However, once the first one was on, it wasn’t too bad since the little tongue and groove fastener system makes sure that the spacing is consistent from row to row.

It was really nice once the surface started coming together to the point where we could walk on it! In some of these pictures, you can also see the low voltage wire running around the framing. This will be for some lighting that we are going to put in the steps and on the railing.

Finally, we finished the last part of the surface decking about mid-day Sunday and it looks great. There were a couple tricky parts getting the last board in since we couldn’t use the regular fasteners and the fact that it needed to be notched for a couple obstacles. All in all, I’m really pleased with it. The color is a bit uneven right now, but once it weathers a bit that will go away.

This last weekend we began on the stairs, which I’ve thought all along would be the toughest part of the whole project (and I think I was right . More about that soon…