As I have mentioned before, one of the main reasons we ended up going with this house was because of the opportunity to put on a deck. And now that we were done with the taking out the old window and adding a slider, it was time to take the “door to no where” and make it the “door to our freaking awesome deck”!! We took a 5 – 6 week break after the slider and started drawing up plans and scouting materials. Decks are what Derek does so he’s very familiar with structural needs, permits, the whole deal and he was extremely excited to be building one for himself finally. He sketched out a basic plan (to which I gave plenty of in put, aka more work with a bump out and double boarder detail) which looked like this and is 600+ sq ft. Once you’ve got that 2nd row of posts why wouldn’t you max out the size right?
With permit in hand Mace laid out where the footings would go and made sure everything was square, which is obviously very important because once those posts are in the ground you ain’t moving them!! And if it isn’t square you’ll see it in final product because the boards won’t line up right. I had no input on this phase.
As you can tell we had some concrete were going to have to remove. He marked out squares for the footings to try and keep most of the slab intact because we didn’t plan on replacing the concrete for a while, if at all. And then the fun began!! He was able to get a hold of a concrete saw and jack hammer from work and with the help of our friend Kyle the boys had some fun with power tools!
And I helped too of course!
By the end of the night this is what we had accomplished. Not looking too bad!
We also decided to get rid of the cement around the old crabapple tree while we had the tools.
Next up it was time for me to head out of town for the weekend and the boys get to digging some holes! 10 to be exact. So they rented an auger for this back-breaking task. Did I mention it was mid July when they did this? Not that you don’t get the idea from the suns out, guns out pics how hot it was for these north country boys!
The depth of the hole has to be below the frost line and the deepest part has to be wider than opening. Not as simple as making a hole in the ground and I’m glad someone was doing was supervising these two while I was away!
These two were at it all day and were beat (I’m not sure Mace moved when I got home he was so tired and sore) by the end of it but all the holes got dug.
Next up was filling them with concrete to form the foundation which we did during the week. Our friend Marc stopped by and helped us out with this but it was pretty straight forward to mix the concrete to the right consistency, pour in the hole, remove the air bubbles with a stick and then smooth out so the post would sit flat. For the 10 holes it us an entire evening.
Of course it decided to rain and we had to scramble to cover the holes to keep the moisture out so the walls didn’t collapse and then our dimensions were off for the inspector the next day. The inspector comes and verifies that the holes meet code before you can move forward with the structure so it was an early morning for us to muck out the holes and hoping they would dry out because we had big plans for the upcoming weekend and if we didn’t pass that would really screw them up. Luckily they holes passed and we were good to move forward, a big sigh of relief for us! And that was then end of week #1 of deck building!
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