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he deck that is in the front of the house is on the small side and my back yard was pretty much unused so I decided to build a deck onto the back of the house. Originally I planned a smaller one but due to the septic pipes being in the way, I ended up building a much larger one. It's roughly 40x20. Yikes! I originally wanted 24x12. Anyways, I plan on building a three season porch on top of it so I overbuilt much of in the way of using 4x6's for posts and spacing the footings closer together than code states. I made a hole to fit an outdoor hot tub which was about 7'x7'. It can fit 4-5 people.

I ran into a few issues when building the deck such as locating the leach bed (previously unknown), house rot and roof issues. Due to the location of the leach bed. I couldn't make the deck a complete rectangle. Anywhere I dug in a certain location filled up with black water. Also, the previous deck had not be flashed and the side of house had rotten out and was infested with carpenter ants. Before I could start building the new deck, I had to replace an 18'x4' section of the exterior wall due to the rot. Lastly, when the deck was built, I was finally able to get on the roof for the first time since it was 6 feet higher off the ground. After inspecting it, I found 6'' of decayed pine needles. Under the needles was a hole in the roofing so that section of the roof needed to be replaced.

Materials: I built the deck out of pressure treated 2x8 joists with 2x6 decking. With 19 8" 4' footings. 3000 galvanized ring nails. 3 cubic yards of concrete for the footings and the 9'x9'x4" slab for the hot tub.

Here is a link to the book I used as a reference for the design.

Started on 5/28/2002

Finished on 5/21/2004

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