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Wednesday, July 24, 2024

What I Do When I'm Not Gaming

I suppose I ought to provide an update to my deck adventure, if for no other reason than as proof that I didn't abandon it again like so many other years.

Last year, car repairs ate up all available money, and the year before I was still in recovery from my little hospital adventure. And the year before that, 2021... Well, I'd rather not talk about that summer again.

But yes, I have been working on the deck this year, and I do have a long term plan of action.

The first stage was to determine if the top of the beams and joists were good enough to use as-is. If they weren't, then I'd likely have to replace the entire deck and... with costs for a new deck running $12,000 to $20,000 for a direct replacement, we don't have the money for that right now.

So I bought a couple 8 foot replacement deck boards and pried the old ones out on the far end with the intent of determining if the so-called bones of the deck were worth saving. 

Luckily, they were, so I replaced them and put in an order for decking that would cover somewhere between 35-40% of the deck. I give it a range because you always over-order on wood being delivered to your house because you have to assume that some of the wood is going to be unusable. 

Looks can be deceiving.

From this side, the wood looked pretty good. However, when I began flipping the boards over, I discovered that was not the case.

There's a reason why I put some boards up
high like this. This flaw just had to be in
the middle, because if it were on the end
I could have found a place for it and cut off
the bad section.

Some boards, however, could be made usable by merely flipping them over so the flaw wasn't showing.

Such as this one. I do sometimes wonder how
people at the mill where this is cut convince
themselves that wood such as this is perfectly
fine to sell at the same price as other, good boards.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been pulling out a row of decking and replacing it with a new one. Although I've been out there early in the morning from time to time, typically as stress relief from work, for the most part I've begun my work after 3:30 PM. That's when the deck is covered in shade from a nearby chokecherry tree.


If you notice that the last board on the end is an old board, that was done on purpose. I'm using that board to be able to snap a line once I'm finished and trim all of the excess off in one cut. That does mean that there are boards that extend pretty far out from the edge of the deck, and I've nearly thwacked myself a few times by forgetting that fact. When I cut the grass last Sunday, I forgot about the 16 foot deck board I set on the top of the rail and nearly smacked into it with my temple. 

Still, the project is continuing, and I'm about 30 - 33% finished:


That has left a lot of old deck boards to get rid of.


That pile is after I broke down a bunch of boards, took care of the nails sticking out, and set them out for trash removal. I sure hope that the trash people aren't gonna complain about the steady stream of old decking they're gonna see.

***

The plan going forward is to finish using these deck boards, then in September I'll get another round of wood, and go until that round is finished. If I need a third bunch in October, that's fine; October is usually our driest month of the year. 

Why spread it out? Well, the short answer is money. I can afford a bit at a time, rather than pay for it all at once. Since the cost pushed me into using pressure treated wood instead of composite*, cost is also determining just how much of the deck I can complete at one time. I'm a one man operation, so I don't want to have all of the wood delivered just to have it sit out, unused, for months.

Once the deck boards are replaced, then I have the Winter to plan out how I want to attack the next phase, which is either the railing or the steps. I'm thinking it's going to be the railing, but I could change my mind and do the steps instead. The last stage of the deck repair will be replacing the skirting and putting in some gravel and whatnot around the edge of the deck to keep the weeds away.

So yeah, multi-year project. One step at a time, however. One step at a time.



*At one point composite decking cost as low as twice that of pressure treated wood, but the price of wood has gone down recently. Still, I'd likely have to rework the deck by adding joists if I wanted to use composite deck boards, because composite isn't as strong as regular wood. Yes, I'd have to paint the deck more regularly than if I used a composite material --and paint is not cheap-- but having to resubmit the deck for review by the county inspectors isn't worth the extra up front cost.

2 comments:

  1. I really wish I were handy enough to do projects like that. I only bought my first house about five years ago after renting my entire life. At first I didn't even know really dumb stuff like needing to change the central air filters or how to take care of a yard. The list of things I can handle myself is growing slowly, but that would certainly be well beyone me.

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    1. (Blogger actually flagged your comment for review for some strange reason, but I manually intervened and took care of it.)

      I don't know if it makes you feel any better, but I certainly didn't learn any of this stuff from my Dad. His Associates Degree may have been in Engineering, but he couldn't use any tools to save his life. He did try, it's just that he wasn't good at being handy around the house. (Or cooking food; he once rather infamously burned soup by cooking a Campbell's condensed soup without adding the can of water to the pot.)

      I just learned how to do things the way you're doing it now: by finding out the hard way.

      It's a helluva lot easier now to figure out how to do things than it was even 30 years ago, where there were a few shows on PBS and some books at the library or bookstore. On Saturday mornings, I used to watch This Old House, The New Yankee Workshop, and Hometime back to back religiously, dreaming of when we could have a house of our own. Then we finally bought one, and I quickly discovered that I knew nothing. And that owning a home means buying a ton of stuff from the hardware store every single season.

      But now, with tons of YouTube videos to watch and websites to visit, at least you have options to learn how to do things. And to be completely honest, I went back and forth a lot about whether I should try to do this myself or just get someone to build me a deck. Then I saw what the price was for a new build, and the sticker shock pushed me into learning as I go on this deck rebuild. I'm pretty sure I'm only going to need to do this once, because I'm not planning a career in deck building, but it's a skill whose components will come in handy in lots of other projects.

      Also, The New Yankee Workshop videos are now on YouTube! I don't even have half of the skill --or the tools-- that Norm Abrams does, but once I'm done with the deck boards I do have a project in mind for a grill cart. I'm just going to modify Norm's design to make it more practical for me (such as just buying wheels for the cart instead of making my own, and using stock sizes of wood to cut down on the need to plane everything).

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