Here Comes the Deck, Part 2

Keeping with my tradition of posting way late, here I am updating the blog after a month since my last post. Life is hard. Blogging about life is harder.

We have a deck and it's kind of amazing. It's not done, of course, so let me give you a phase two deck project update. Big Ken left. Life got in the way. It rained. A lot. We ran out of screws. Broke the pilot hole bit. Had to order it online. Ran out of screws again. Finally got the top screwed down. Here's the longer version.

One of our lovely neighbors loaned us his deck jig, and I immediately loved the idea of not seeing a bunch of screws on the top of our deck. "So, yeah, let's do that," I said. "It will be great," I said. (No one thought it would be easy so no one said that.)


Well, we had to also use special screws which had to be ordered from Amazon. We ended up reordering three more boxes; therefore taking four times longer than just screwing in some deck screws. At one point the drill bit that came with the deck jig for the pilot holes broke, so we had to reorder that too. Here's a pic of the Handy Man standing on top of an entire Saturday worth of work. (The boards behind his right leg are screwed down.)
You can just see the glee radiating from a good, honest day of back-breaking work. (eye roll)

Then it rained, the boards we laid out didn't line up, and we had to cut off a high spot of the frame where the boards warped a bit and lifted up. Did I mention our bit broke and we had to reorder screws (amateurs!).
Slowly, but surely, it eventually came together but we needed steps off the floating deck. Big Ken, came back in early March to help us with the deck's cascading steps. To be honest, we had no idea how we were going to do it but we figured it out.

Step out of the mud room (you can still see we are screwing in boards at this stage):
 Decided on a box step. Here's a photo of the frame:
Of course, NOTHING, can be easy and straight forward when improving an old house and that extends, apparently outside. In the above photo you can see that the walk way is sloped. We discovered (finally noticed?) that there is a giant low spot in the middle of our grass and so what was supposed to be an 8" drop from the step to the ground is like a 10" drop in some places. We plan to fix that when we bring in material for the walk way around the deck. Oiy!

We have a deck and we finished it on March 12th (six days before the little one turned three). Is it perfect? Hell, no! Do I love it? Absolutely, yes!
And, since you know I'm a big fan of the before and after, here she is!
Before:
After:

Up next on the blog, sanding and sealing (which we still need to do) and decorating which I'm most excited about.


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