It's Friday Night

And they aren't done yet. The rails are up, but the stairs are still a little thin and the trim hasn't been added. It does look better, and I can safely wander out on the deck now. Still can't let the cats out there at night as they may not figure out how to get down the stairs. Anyway, here are 4 shots for today. When you look at the top view of the stairs you can see the rest of the material for the deck. Looks like Monday will be the day they finish.

I'll try to get the builder's website address and give them a plug. But today I'm heading out for a few and the paper work is in a different part of the house.

Enjoy, and be careful of the splinters.

The deck is on

Not a truly exciting title, but there is a deck today and they started working on the posts. The step at the bottom will seem high until I lay the patio down, but we will get by. Here are the pictures, in focus this time.

Enjoy, and be careful of the splinters.

They're Back

They came in and added the posts headers and stringers on the deck. Unfortunately I screwed up the camera shots and all of the pictures are out of focus. I included one anyway, just so you have a view. All of the wood is treated, the posts are 6x6 and the headers are 6x8. The jog is where the stairs go down. The diagonal pieces are just braces to help keep everything upright until there is more structure.

Enjoy, and be careful of the splinters.

Stamped and Poured

Okay, when I got home tonight the lower deck was poured and stamped and I've included pictures of it. I also included a picture from my second floor looking down so you can see the final pattern. The colors are not valid yet as there is a layer of coloring over the top of the cement. Tomorrow they will clean that up and seal the patio. This also means that they will complete the upper portion of the deck by next Friday. It looks huge, about 1/3 larger than the previous deck.

Enjoy, and be careful of the splinters.

Ready to Pour

Cement that is. The size of the deck got changed again, now it is 26 feet. We've picked a pattern for the stamp and colors too. Here are the shots I took. Re-bar is down and the holes are deep where the posts go. We hope it won't rain for a couple of days so they can pour the cement and seal. Next week they build the deck and by Friday we should be on the deck to party.

Beginning the New Deck

Okay, this isn't really woodworking, well maybe. I pulled the old deck down and removed the wisteria. The first shot is the back of the house before any updates. The next shot is after they contractor removed the cement pads and marked the area of the deck. All of the work needs to be done by hand as they can't get a tractor back there, any more. My wife saw the marking and said the deck wasn't wide enough, so now we are getting a bid to add another 3 feet to both the cement pad beneath the deck and the deck itself.



We also had a fun time picking out a stamp pattern and a color. We agreed with a stamp pattern fairly quickly, but a color ... we are still trying to work that one out. At http://www.prolinestamps.com/ we selected Castle Stone for the design. We had limitations as the cement contractor doesn't carry the entire line. But it looks good to us. For the colors we looked at Davis Colors and had some real issues trying and wondering what the real colors would look like. They base color the cement with a color, then use a colored release agent which provides another layer of color on top. But this becomes as much art as luck with the colors.

Enjoy, and be careful of the splinters.