Wally’s Workshop

Well, it’s spring and I’m finally getting around to finishing up the deck. It will be a thing of beauty(if I do say so myself even though it is almost entirely made of “junk” lumber.

I originally purchased the wood for it in many separate steps: a bunch of culled redwood from Evans Building Supply, another bunk of culled “outdoor wood” from Evans, a cart of culled Redwood from Home Depot, many carts of misc. outdoor woods (for joists, etc) from HD, and a bunk of misc. width fir I won from Musick and Sons Auctions.

Total investment: Around $650 for enough wood to build a deck well over 1000 sq feet., even though many of the boards had to be straightened out. I figure that I saved at least $5000 by buying “less than perfect” lumber (ha! many of the boards when installed are just as good as new), and doing all of the labor myself.

Once I have the last 6 feet or so completed, I will rent a deck sander from HD ($50 for 24 hours), and then apply a good sealer/stain. It will be cool.

Here’s what has transpired so far:

Our original (mostly covered) concrete patio was about 12′ x 33′. Not a bad size, but it was still too crowded when entertaining. Plus, I have a natural distaste for plain concrete. So, I started out by first laying a few pressure treated 2×4 boards down in the patio, and leveling them as well as possible using shims every foot or so. Once they were down, I start screwing the redwood boards to them. This was stage 1, and once it was complete I had an 11′ x 15′ section with the boards running perpendicular to the house.

The first deck section was installed at the main entrance to the patio, under the patio roof, and adjacent to the outdoor kitchen I’m still building. I used redwood here - even though it’s mostly covered by the roof - because I wanted something comfortable to walk on, that looks good, but can still take the elements. I figured if the most’protected areas of the deck were fir, the “transition” areas were redwood, and the weather exposed areas were treated lumber, everything would work out just fine.

Stage 2, which was completed last fall, consistent of a transition area between the covered patio area and the exposed part of the deck. To break things up I decided to lay this section perpindicular to the first one. I started out laying the with redwood parallel to the house and butted up to the outdoor kitchen, and about halfway switched to treated wood. Since the rest of the exposed part of the deck was supposed to be treated (by far the most lumber I had), I figured this would be a nice was to transition to it. The size of this section was roughly 12′ x 15′.

Stages 1 and 2 were both completed in the fall of 2004. In the spring of 2005 I started in on stages 3 and 4, which will be covered in another post.