Well it took a bit longer than expected but it’s finally done.  A few weekends of bad weather plus 2 kids and a wife who is never home meant I had a few 30 minute pockets of time spread out over a few weeks and 1 actual full day. Continue reading

Doesn’t look like the weather is going to co-operate today so I won’t be getting much work done so we packed up the kiddies and headed off to Home Depot to get some ideas.  I orginally planned to replace the decking, but after talking to the guy in the deck department he suggested re-finishing is probably going to be a better route unless the decking is rotted out (which is isn’t)

So the new plan is to add some wrap-around steps, put up railings around the areas that won’t have the steps attached and to re-finishing and re-stain the surface.  That’s probably going to save a few hundred bucks easily.  The current deck is just a simple 12 X 16 deck surround by weeds, weeds and more weeds so I drew up a simple plan of what the finished product will look like. Continue reading

Pretty good progress on day 1, managed to remove the decking to inspect more of the foundation and also removed all the railings.

I was being kind when I called the deck an ‘eye-sore’ in my previous post, when I was removing the railings, the tops of the railings literally fell apart as I pulled the railings down after removing the bolts that attached the railing posts to the deck.  After those bolts were removed I literally pulled the rest of it apart with my bare hands. Continue reading

This project has been a long time coming since we bought our place a few years ago.  The deck out back was in terrible shape when we bought the place  (handyman special) and 2 winters haven’t exactly been kind to the decking.  I can’t exactly call this a ‘how to’ article, but it’ll serve as a pretty good starting point for the novice handyman who needs a relatively easy project to start out with. Continue reading