Building a deck on my house

Mushtang said:

It's a little old. I bumped it to add a picture of where I am.


It's going VERY well. Thank! We're drinking lots and lots and lots of water all day. The last day I did start feeling not so well near the end, but I think it was more the bending over to screw in the deck screws over and over.

I tried kneeling, but that's killer on the knees. Then I tried sitting, but that took a long time to move around and was also hard on the knees. The best way was to just spread my feet and bend all the way over for each screw (that sounds dirty, but it's not). It's not easy to do that for hours on end. especially with the sun that hot.

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Yep, I hear ya...

Few years back, our farm pond at Shiner went dry... like POWDER DRY during the summer drought that year. We took the 5610S with the loader on it to Shiner and started digging out the pond to rework it-- over the years, sand had washed in one end pretty badly, and the banks were collapsing... I dug out about three feet of sand out of that pond, and enlarged it to roughly the size of a football field on the bottom, tapered the banks up at the recommended 30 degree angle, added about another foot of sand to the dam bank and the rest went on/behind the side banks... my brother ran the 2310 with a box blade leveling the dirt out-- I ran the big tractor down in the pond, scoop up a bucketful of sand, raise the loader, crawl up the bank out of the pond, dump it, and circle back down the bank into the bottom for the next bucketload...

Well, none of our tractors have cabs... I added some kiddie pools on top of homemade welded frames, mounted to the ROPS up over the operator's deck, but lemme tell ya, even with a sunshade, it gets MIGHTY hot when the temp is 106+ and the hot air from the engine radiator fan is getting ducted straight back alongside the engine along the loader frame, and blowing on you... and you're sitting on top of the transmission which is also scalding hot because the hydraulics and gears are working so hard... My brother and I were keeping a couple quarts of Gatorade in bottles in small coolers on the deck behind our feet, and we'd put a few bottles of water frozen solid in there, packed tight, to keep the Gatorade ice cold... it's all be melted in about 30 minutes or so! I know one day it had to be 120+ degrees on that tractor due to the engine/transmission heat... I drank about 2-3 quarts of Gatorade, plus about 8-10 bottles of water, plus a couple glasses of iced tea at lunch... and he did the same... I think we stopped ONCE to pee, and maybe dropped a cupful... LOL The rest we sweated out...

Don't look forward to the stuff I gotta do, because we're hovering around 100 or so here in SE TX...

Later! OL JR

Mushtang said:

The best way was to just spread my feet and bend all the way over for each screw...

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Are we still talking about building a deck?

ThirstyBarbarian said:

Are we still talking about building a deck?

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Yeah. But I just LOVE building my deck!

Mushtang said:

Yeah. But I just LOVE building my deck!

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Sounds like lots of screwing in awkward positions. Be careful of your back!

ThirstyBarbarian said:

Sounds like lots of screwing in awkward positions. Be careful of your back!

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Oh, ya had to go there dincha??

Later! OL JR

All the deck boards are on the main level. The two posts sticking up on the far end will be the tops of the stair railings. The second picture is looking down from in between them.



The landing structure is built and the deck boards are started on it. Notching the deck boards for all those posts isn't fun.



After the landing is finished it'll be time to build the stairs!

Looking good!

Sorry for bumping such an old thread, but I have a question about stain/sealer so I figured I'd go ahead and update this with pictures of the finished deck.

Here's some pictures of the deck that I took right after finishing the build at the end of last September. I don't have any taken recently.

Here's a few pics of the stairs and landing. I buried the drain line and laid down some pine bark.




Some deck furniture lives up here now, but these pics were taken with just these two lonely chairs.


Here's a view of the finished deck, but unfortunately this was before the cleanup was finished. There's now outdoor furniture, a fire pit, and a hot tub under there.


A new grill was bought and I ran a natural gas line after converting the burners. We love grilling out!!


I'm very pleased with the way the deck turned out. Exactly like my design, which is nice!

Next I need to add some lighting out there and stain the wood. The deck is five months old and in another month or two I'm going to want to stain it. The two main reasons for staining a deck is to protect the wood from UV rays which can turn the wood to an ashy color and make it look like crap (my old deck), and to seal it from weather.

Anyone have any experience with deck stain? I'd love to hear some things that I might not have thought about. You guys are great for coming up with other points of view!!

LOL read this post today now all the ads are for decks!
deck estimator, composite decking :eyeroll: