Day One

So demolition is pretty much done and the ledger board is hung on the side of the house with glee. Now it's time to start building the deck! I have four days off from work, so Saturday through Tuesday is the time we have to build this thing. We have our design laid out in our heads, and the kind of drawing you would expect to find on the back of a napkin, and know roughly what we want the basic final product to be. So let's see how this builds out.

Started with rim joists and hangers

Got level 1 rimmed and started on level 2

the consistent perspective

Happy framer

The morning was hot already. Like over 90* hot. I wanted to get started on framing, and once we made some progress Kelley could start hanging joists while I rimmed the next level. Because this span is 10' I had to add the double joist below the rim joists to stay within code. We used joist hanger brackets inside of the rim, then doubled up the front edge (also req by local code).

my Evil Genius is the first to step out through the door to nowhere

Kelley is laying flooring

Going through the afternoon we got level 1 joists in place and the first couple of floor boards laid down. It's 10' by 10' square, so we used 10' floor boards. Actually the width is slightly less than 10', we left a 1" overhang on both sides of the rim.

End of the day - level 1 is mostly floored, level 2 is rimmed, and level 3 has been started

We ran out of screws with 2 boards left

Enjoying the fruits of a hard days labor

Aviator brewing is a local NC beer

Youngest is happy with our progress.

We were able to use whole boards to floor level 1, but we ran out of screws with 2 boards left. Since they didn't have to be cut, Kelley was able to lay those boards without assistance. We really feel that screwing the floorboards down instead of nailing them helps them hold better. We used 2x8 floor joists on 18" centers. That platform was really solid when it was all said and done. I wanted to stay ahead of her with the rim joists so we could see the final outline of the whole deck as we worked through the levels, but didn't finish level 3.

Got to save something for day 2, right? This was a solid day of work and the end product turned out better than we expected.