Deck be Done!

It's taken four full weekends, but we can now proudly say we have built a deck! We can't say it's been easy and not back breakingly difficult at times, but we can certainly say we've enjoyed the challenge and are just a little bit chuffed with our very first serious renovation project.

Last weekend we put in some seriously hard yards to finish laying all 54 rows of timber- pre-drilling more than 1500 holes before individually screwing them all into place.




It wasn't without hiccoughs! One of the timber bearers was slightly bowed so when we tried to lay down the pattern of the timber there was a very large bump in the middle. Thankfully Steve was able to "borrow" a planer from his work which saved us several hours of sanding (we probably wasted about an hour trying that option)


And then of course, we had the inevitable situation of getting down to the final few rows and realising they wouldn't fit without halving the width of one of the rows. We had to get all McGuyver and create a means of cutting it without a table saw and without a table. The result was nothing short of genius! (if we may say so ourselves). We screwed a circular saw onto a pallet! Simple but effective.

But probably the greatest little invention was Steve's spacer device. We needed a way to create a spacer between the timber rows. Turns out all we needed was a piece of wood and a nail!

All in all we're pretty happy with the result. While there are still some other things we want to add - like a step at the end leading into the garden, a bar ledge kind of like this, some screening to match the rest of the house, add some lighting like this and then of course we have to furnish it!

Check out the before and after pics!