Offgridburbia

Our porch deck materials were delivered a week and a half ago. As we’ll be on hiatus for the latter half of June and the first half of July we pushed forward with finishing the porch deck before our break. The reasoning being that lumber treated for being in close contact with the ground has a tendency to warp as it dries out. The process was fairly similar to building the cabin floor with a few caveats. Unfortunately, Larry Haun didn’t produce a deck building video but I found Shannon from House-improvements.com on YouTube who went through building a deck in detail.

Here’s the time lapse video of the week

And here are some stills with more details:

Our concrete pier inspection

Measuring the baseline elevation of the cabin

Measuring the elevation at each pier location

Going into the A/C to do some calculations

Assembling our grade beams

Installing posts

Confirming that our grade beam is level

Cutting posts to size

You can see here how we accounted for sloping ground by cutting the posts to size. The builder’s level made this a pretty easy job and would have been a more elegant solution for doing the cabin foundation.

Attaching the deck rim joist to the cabin rim joist with lag screws. If I had been thinking ahead I would have just doubled up the cabin floor rim joist.

Installing joist hangers

Checking that the deck is square

Snapping a chalk line to square off the joists

Cutting joists ends off square

So, you may have noticed my new safety gear. At one time, lumber treated for ground contact was preserved with arsenic which is carcinogenic. This lumber was treated with alkaline copper quaternary which is supposedly non-carcinogenic but breathing any kind of particulates is generally not a good idea. I had an issue that while wearing a disposable paper dust mask my eye protection would fog up so I always had this eye versus lung and possibly finger trade off conundrum when cutting lumber. This respirator solves that problem so that I can protect my eyes, lungs, fingers and as and added bonus look like a hillbilly storm trooper.

Moving extra/trash materials I had stored under the cabin. If you check out pros and cons for pier and beam construction, storing things under the house is listed under both the pro and con column.

For the diagonal sections I cut the rim joist first and then cut the other joists to fit.

I’m notching out the deck boards where the porch roof and rail posts will be installed. After the first two rows of deck boards installation was pretty smooth sailing.

Some of the deck boards were a little bowed so I had to use a some persuasion.

And some deck boards needed more persuasion than others.

With a wrap around porch I had some flexibility to work around the movement of the sun. In the morning I could work on the west side and in the afternoon I could switch over to the east side. However, I think in this picture I’m explaining to Paul that typically the north side of the house wouldn’t receive any sun except around the summer solstice when the sun is at its highest point in the sky and in our case less than two weeks away.

Yep, full sun. Fortunately, there’s an encroaching tree limb that I haven’t trimmed yet. Only a couple of more rows and I’ll be there.

I’m adding blocking so I can lay one deck board parallel to the joists to create a transition between the deck boards running diagonally. Paul is attaching the joists the grade beam with hurricane ties so the deck doesn’t fly off.

Racing the sun on the west side of the house

Paul giving our Dad some pointers on ripping a deck board

Installing the ripped deck boards to finish off the deck.