To sustain the momentum of his summer farming experiment or maybe just to make up for the neglect during my summer solo homeowner experiment, Tony has been super project oriented and the major task of the early summer was a backyard deck. Planning began in the fall when he decided to prematurely remove the concrete steps – maybe as a daily two foot drop reminder to not let the deck plans fade into the seemingly endless list of homeowner projects. After wiping away and re-snapping several chalk lines along our not so level siding to get an as good as it’s gonna get “straight” line, post holes were dug, concrete tubes poured, and a foundation formed. A search for red cedar turned up a price tag exceeding our budget so we did some reading to find the most eco-friendly deck building materials and found a helpful article at Sierra Club. It, of course, pointed out that the most environmentally sound avenue would be no deck at all. Ha. But…but we already busted out the steps to prove we would build it and the support beams took so long to get just right. No turning back. The next best choice would be to use synthetic wood but we were set on real wood…so to appease the nature gods we went with a FSC approved port orford cedar off craigslist and found a low VOC natural oil based wood protectant called Timber Pro – so non-toxic Tony claims you could drink it, which I did…not. So, we may have compromised some of the green theme to maintain a certain aesthetic but we made up for it in other ways. And now for the obligatory before and after (and during) pictures…
Before the deck...
During the build...
Superhero named Tony!
Terrafrancas with tools! (Big thanks to Tony's dad for picking up my slack.)
Completed Deck!