Hi Ho Hi Ho...a Decking We Will Go - DAY 1

It is official the deck work has begun!

Admittedly the husband started this project about 2 weeks later than first anticipated....

There was a last minute MAJOR change to the overall plan.  After a couple frustrating weeks trying to work with Lowes and Home Depot on the multi-level deck plan he made the decision to go a bit easier (and bigger in the end) and keep it a simple one level deck.

Getting rid of the two level design is really going to open up the deck.  The main issue was the levelness of the ground (or lack there of) and the fact that the stairs to connect the two deck levels would completely cut into the usable square footage of the deck. 

So this weekend is the weekend.  The wife's Dad is in town for a few days visiting baby girl before he takes off for his Alaska fishing house for the summer.  We decided to put him to work.  He has experience in building houses and decks so the husband welcomed some advice.  Drilling into the side of one's house will give a person pause.  It is nice to have some back-up support.

After spending the better part of an evening reviewing plans the first trip to the hardware store was made.  On tap for Day #1 was to dig the holes for the posts.

While this may not be a massive all day undertaking in most backyards ours is full of rocks.  I should say full of boulders.  If you look around the yards in our neighborhood you will see everyone has landscaped with large rocks.  Many of these landscaping choices were not made solely for aesthetics.  These rocks came out of the ground during the home building and had to go somewhere.

As we have chronicled in the blog previously it is always a bit of a crap shoot to make a hole in the yard.  If you are living right you may be able to dig a few inches before encountering your first rock.  When the husband was planting all of the fruit trees he would often start digging only to find a huge boulder in his way.  The nice thing about planting the fruit trees is he could pick a different spot to plant if the boulder was too big.

When digging holes for the posts on the deck they only had one option for where each post hole needed to go.  So if a boulder was encountered....it needed to come out.  Luckily there was only one really big rock in one of the holes.  Unluckily there were a ton of mid-sized rocks making the digging really slow hard work.

I am not sure that the Dad was fully aware of what a massive effort it was going to be to dig 5 holes.  By the end he was no doubt rethinking his enthusiastic "I would love to help with the deck" comment.

Of course as always there was plenty of pug help.

Task accomplished Deck Day #1:
**Post holes dug
**Concrete forms placed

Plan for Deck Day #2:
**Attach the ledger boards to the house
**Pour concrete