Ran Out Of Deck Puns For Blog Titles

Well, it's Thursday now.  I was supposed to have had all the joists in and the upper stringers done.  But, alas, I have yet to touch a stringer.  I did, however, get all the joists done.  And, they look great!

What set me back a bit was not having the material with which to make the stringers.  So, I moved on to planning out the decking.  We're going with the pattern pictured here. (No, this is not our deck)  The boards will make squares wrapping around the tree that comes up through our deck.  So, we'll have four lines of connection points as you see here radiating out from the tree.  The problem I ran into was that none of these proposed lines of connections landed on a joist.  The last thing we want to do is have places in our deck that are bouncy or spongy, so I needed to add two joists and a bunch of blocking.  I almost got done with that before finally quitting for the night around 9:00.  It should only take about 30-40 minutes to knock out the rest.

None of that was on my calendar.  So, I still feel good about the amount of progress I've made in the time frame for which I've given myself.  I'm hoping that the weather works out where I can continue tonight.  If so, I'll make a trip to Lowe's on the way home from work to grab the stringers material.  I'll get the rest of the blocking done and then start cutting out my stringers.

I don't have any cool photos that show the most recent changes but that's fine because it wouldn't be all that different from yesterday's.  But, I do have the drawing that I've been using to plan this deck with.  I haven't shared that yet.  As always, click on them to make them bigger.  The first photo is where I have it now.  The second is the steps I have left to do, not including the actual decking.  I have this in an editable GIMP file that has all the different steps in separate layers.  This way, I could add the layers or remove them from view to help me in the designing stage.  I've included the file in the 'Downloads' section under sub-header 'GIMP Creations' in the drop-down list at the top of this blog.  Feel free to download it and play around to your heart's content.  Don't have GIMP?  No problem.  That is also found in the 'Downloads' section above under the 'Software' sub-header.  What's that you say?  Photo editing software that's comparable to better than Photoshop being given away for free?  No, it's not too good to be true.  It's open source software.

Here's a quick link to the next deck update blog.

Posted in: DIY,home renovation