Click the button below and use PayPal to buy me a cup of coffee or pint of beer.

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

Use the Buttons Above to View Individual Photo albums