The Unfettered Bloke

I’ve never been one of those “outdoorsie” types… frankly, I’ve always hated yardwork and having to keep up with the lawn. If it were socially acceptable to just have a cement lawn all around, I’d totally go for that. So this summer, I got this crazy notion to go the opposite way and renovate my entire yard… got nothing better to do, right? We’ve got a long ways to go, but we’ve made some headway.

The biggest part of the project was expanding our deck. It was 10×10 but we’ve extended it to 18×14. My dad’s been helping me out with all of it, thankfully, because I don’t have a carpenter bone in my body. We’ve been working on it for 3 weeks now (just on Saturday’s) and have everything done but the flooring trim work, railing, stairs and the pergola. It’s actually been a lot of fun and I’ve enjoyed seeing it all come together. We’re hoping to have the deck done by the 4th of July, so that gives us 2 more weeks. The pergola shouldn’t be too bad of a project to do, but we’ll wait till after the 4th to attack that. Here’s a few pictures of the transformation process from each week.

Week 1 Before: To keep the deck "functional" for our 2 dogs to go potty, we went ahead and flipped the stairs around to the front, between the beams.

Week 1 After: We were able to dig all the holes for the posts and secure them with cement blocks. Took awhile to get everything square and level, but quite a lot done for a day's work.

Week 2: We got everything framed week 2. It was quite a chore to get everything square and level, but the hard part is done now! Notice we had to cut the stairs in 1/2... due to the center beams. Took the dogs a bit to figure that out, but it's still functional!

Week 3: It's starting to come together! We knocked out the existing deck flooring and rails and laid the new flooring. Just need to finish adding in all the screws and cut the ends on both sides, add the railing and stairs and we'll have ourselves a new deck!

Landon checking out the new deck