The Deck Remodel (or The Deck Being Decked Out!)

Another part of our back yard patio project was fixing up the deck. I suppose you could almost call this project more of a backyard remodel. In my last post I showed you a step/landing I built to bridge the gap between our patio and the deck. Today’s post is all about (and around) the deck. In the picture below you can see what our deck looked like before this weekend, a nondescript-builder-standard-pressure-treated deck. Our deck was kind of like the windshield wipers on a car, they are there and functional but you really don’t talk about them! There’s almost two feet of clearance under most of the deck, which would barely be enough to store things. I would love to have a deck I could finish off the underside as a storage area or even as a gathering spot but that won’t happen with this house. To dress up this area we added latticework. You can even see it stored underneath the deck!

In these pictures you can see the completed latticework around the deck as well as the new landscape timber planter beds. The latticework encloses the deck area while still allowing good air flow. I plan to install finishing pieces later to cover the edges near the posts. The planter beds will need filled and then planted but the most tedious work is done: the building. I used an electric miter saw to make the cuts and deck screws to hold them together. The timbers aren’t staked into the ground but their weight is enough to hold them in place. I tried to make the screws as inconspicuous as possible by placing them on the insides of the beds. In the top right picture you can see the drainage tube from the water downspout. I’m considering turning that into a dry creek bed that will direct water into the birdbath garden.

In the pictures below you can see how it looks from a short distance away. The landscape timbers need 2-3 more additional timbers and they will be complete, I just ran out of them! In the bottom two pictures you can see the types of cuts I made. The bottom left picture used two 22.5 degree cuts to make an angles edge on the corner. Against the deck and the latticework I put the back of the landscape timber planter bed. It should protect the latticework from the soil that will be put inside the bed to make the deck garden. There’s another new garden name!

Here in this picture you can see the opening underneath the deck that I left intentionally. I wanted a way to get underneath the deck should the need arise. Gail asked me the other day in my post about the pyracantha cuttings where I would plant one. The answer is halfway in between the deck and the crawl space access door. There’s a viburnum near that spot right now that I plan on moving this fall toward the deck and a little more forward. To the right of the timbers will be a gravel pathway to the crawl space access door.

Here’s the view from the backyard toward the house. To the right is the birdbath garden and up ahead you can see the patio that was still a mess when I took the picture. Since the picture was taken the patio has been cleaned off and the Japanese maple garden has been planted with some of it’s new residents.