Hello all. When we last saw our heroes...we were pretty cheesed off. After declining to have the contractor spend yet more time at our place and realizing we couldn't live with the deck as it stood, we settled on the best option left (ruling out having another contractor come in to redo the job)--we tackled it ourselves.
After we took off the decking boards we noticed another construction problem. The four 4x4 posts cemented into the ground make up half the underlying structure. A board attached to the house is the other. Between them you run the joists to which you attach the decking boards. The joists are supposed to attach around these 4x4 posts, but the contractor placed one post in the wrong spot and had to cut it short/notch out where the right-most joint needed to go.
We couldn't do much about that but made several other fixes to try to center the deck by adding another board to the left side...
center the screws on the decking boards by adding boards to the the left sides...
and lower the stairs to get our desired 6x10 platform by adding a new facing board below the one they installed...
Then we had to address the stairs. We would reuse the concrete paving stones but sink them to avoid having the stairs on the right be too high above the ground. Since we knew the stringers would be level where they attached to the deck, we needed to make sure they'd be level where they hit the pavers.
Then we attached the stringer to our new, lower facing board. The little blue clamps held the stringer and hanging bracket together until we could attach them with screws and the big orange clamp (along with the paver) kept the stringer at the right height. Again we double checked to ensure everything was still level.
We had planned to use only six stringers but revised the plan when we thought that the extra space might make the deck boards on the stairs susceptible to sagging or bowing. Unfortunately we realized that only after we'd attached some 1x8 boards as the risers, so we had to finagle the last two stringers under the deck and into position.
With that settled we could finish attaching boards on the stairs...
and then finish the whole thing by attaching the deck boards...
We'll figure something for a handrail, but for now here's our deck. We're much happier with it.
Until next time.
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