I turned in my beer bottles and decided to put the windfall towards a new deck. Step #1 is: destroy the old deck.
Old Deck:
Old Deck Destroyed:
Empty space where deck used to be
Click here for links to more photos
The above photos were taken before and after the first day of demolition: more of the debris has been removed now, and the spa itself should be removed in its entirety on Monday. Don’t get any silly ideas: I don’t actually do construction or destruction work of this magnitude. This is all being done by various contractors. We have a general contractor who seems like a nice guy to deal with, we’ve almost settled on the roof (the whole 16×30′ expanse will be roofed over), and we just picked out the new spa. 47 jets, 8 horse power, and a little waterfall- I can’t wait, and neither can my aching back!
My my… aren’t we being fun. 🙂 Should look good when it;s done.
I hope it will look decent. Mostly, I want an outdoor “space” I feel more comfortable using year round. The new spa is probably the thing that most people will notice first, but having the whole area roofed is what will make the real difference.
To be honest I’m not 100% sure about turning the outdoors indoors with the roof but hey that’s just me. As long as it is tastefully done (curtain wall? okay that’s over engineering things) I suppose that should work out.
You don’t have skin that burns in under 10 minutes or eyes that strain in the sun. I think I am descended from a tribe of cave/deep forest dwellers.
That and the fact that 200 days out of the year it is perfectly fine to be outdoors here… except for the fact that its raining 🙂 The roof we are planning on (assuming the numbers come in so we can afford everything) would be a clear acrylic material called acrylite. It has molded-in tint and UV filtering, so it covers off my sun sensitivity, but is as clear as glass.
Demolition is all done now… I’ll be adding one more picture here to show the empty space where our old spa used to be. The guys doing the demolition discovered a large rat nest in the base of the spa enclosure itself- no surprise there, but apparently it was quite…disgusting. Hurray for contracted workers!
Hmmm, guess what I’ve been doing? Yes, decks. 😉
Finally found a contractor that would come in and fix the mess left by building a sidewalk on top of sand held back by a wood retaining wall… wood rots, sand runs out, concrete collapses.
Took away the rotting timbers and put concrete walls around the part I wanted to save, but did everything with a bobcat. Chewed the back yard to shreds.
So … the idea to have decks in next year has moved up thanks to a sea of mud and home depot “do not pay till July 2009.” (And I’m not building them myself either… I don’t have the time to do it all myself, though I have a reasonable confidence that I could. I have a lot of other things that have to be fixed as well because of this.)
Of course, now I have the problem of picking out decking material. I do not want to refinish the decks every year so that leaves out any sort of wood I could afford. So fake wood it is… I like the looks of EON but the installer guy says that they haven’t been standing up to our climate. He says the Brite material does and is cheaper.
One can’t seem to find product reviews of this sort of stuff online 🙁 Oh well, at least here in Alberta I don’t have to worry about rat nests!
Oh yeah, see you in 2 weeks!
I’ve heard good things about Brite- our contractor, though, is recommending TimberTech. I think we’ll probably go with this=> http://www.timbertech.com/Products/DeckingPlanks/Earthwood.aspx
Our climate though puts different demands on the material than Alberta… and the lack of rats is definitely a plus 😉
Update: Applying my l337 Googling skills, I found a couple of “reviews” comparing TimberTech to other products.
A review=> http://log-homes.thefuntimesguide.com/2007/09/choiocedek_vs_timbertech.php
A collection of technical reports on composite deck materials=> http://www.icc-es.org/reports/index.cfm?csi_num=06500&view_details=yes
The technical reports are interesting, but probably more readable for someone like Oblivion 😉 The one thing I noticed was that the TimberTech can have up to 24″ between joists, whereas the Brite is a maximum of 16″. I guess that means that the TimberTech (theoretically) is more “sturdy” and could be built with fewer support joists, but beyond that I’m not sure what it means. Brite is a Canadian company, though: and that goes in its favour.
Hell while interesting techy stuff, even I’m not that well versed in composite deck materials. The 24″ versus 16″, yer right, deals with its lack of deflection over span. Greater spans, less material = cheaper (or so some theories go).
Canadian is always good. In the end the materials are still new enough to not have any real good idea on true lifespan.