Latest Home Improvement

The front of our house back in August. This is the “before” picture.

Usually, we plan our projects over time, making absurdly low estimates of time and cost and then we change our plans as we go along to fit the true situation, not what we expected.

This project was different. One evening, Dwayne took a stick to the joists supporting our very narrow, mostly useless front deck. This is what happened.

Our deck went from “of course it’s fine” to “whatever you do---don’t use it!” Luckily this happened right at bonus time.

Let me say, if we had an unlimited supply of money and less social guilt, we’d spend almost all on home improvement projects. And we definitely like hiring people who are far, far more capable than either of us!

So we brought out a few contractor and considered options, including completely eliminating the deck, taking out the sliding glass doors and redoing the windows there. That would probably have been the cheapest option, but we’d still spend a lot of money and have much less than we started from. We could simply replace the deck, but a 4 foot wide deck (like the original) is pretty useless. So we decided to replace it with a 10 foot deck, giving us lots and lots of space overlooking the best part of our view. As we were looking at that cost, I had the great idea of asking about some of the newer manufactured “wood” decking. Simply by doubling the original price (!!), I could have a deck that would never need to be sanded, stained, scraped, replaced, or painted again. I don’t mine the first 4 so much, but I hate hate HATE painting the square railing posts. And I have done them all, twice, in the last seven years. Suddenly, doubling the cost seemed like a bargain.

Again, a before picture, as seen from the living room.

Then the original deck was removed. It gave the living room a surreal infinity edge feel.

Then it was framed.

Quite precisely.

Then the Trex boards and railings went up. (We had ordered round black railings, but received the square ones instead. I was gone the day the railing was installed and decided that it wasn’t a big enough deal to complain about. It’s still a good look.)

Finally, our new deck is done. It leads to a few more future projects. There’s no point in having a garden under the deck now as sun will never reach it. And it’s time we put in a short stairset from the front walkway down to the patio. And the area under the deck might be a great place to put some plastic “roofing” to make it a protected outdoor area. But even if it stays just like it is, we love it and will get a lot of use from it. Starting next summer.

A query: has anyone reading this ever had a contractor who will be working more than 2 days actually show up every day on time? Or call if they don’t? We loved this contractor but he still wouldn’t show for a few days and only offer an explanation or an update after I tracked him down. This 3-4 day project took 3.5 weeks! I have never had a contractor not live down to this reputation.