blogging the deck

So, when I wrote my first real blog entry, it was to show-off my mad shed-building skills. That was back in May 2006. A wee bit has changed in the Truxillo-Romaine household since then. I am both surprised and not surprised that I’ve gone well over a year since my last construction project. However, almost on a whim, we built an addition to our back deck this weekend.

It’s not really a deck, because it sits on the ground, but that actually made it more difficult to build. The decking sits on 2x4 sleepers that sit on the stones we built the deck to cover. The problem is that all the shimming and leveling of the sleepers was more tedious than we thought it would be. If it were really a deck, I would have leveled 6 or 8 foundation posts and erected a framework to attach the decking to (and building permits!). Once the first few beams are leveled, the decking goes fast. Instead, we were leveling the sleepers under the decking about every other deck board.

The results are quite nice though. It lets us walk out into the backyard barefoot without having to walk on the stones that hurt feet of all sizes. It gives us more room to use more of our yard too. We’ve been talking about building an outdoor seating area with a Japanese-like feel: close to the ground for adults while being child sized. We’ll skip the built-in hibachi.