The Deck

Jay

This project all started when Conor's brother Jay (the guy in the picture to the left) came down from Connecticut to add a new section to the deck and re-do all of the decking.

We had gotten a couple of quotes for the deck work from local companies and Jay's answer was "yeah, we can do that!".

The Fence

As we were setting up this work, we spoke about our pool fence. We had built the fence about 9 years agow with Cedar. All parts were Cedar. For those of you that don't know, Cedar is a nice, long lasting wood, as long as you don't have persistent ground contact -- and the posts of our fence did have such contact. As you can see from the photo to the right, many of the posts had simply rotted at the base and the fence panels were falling down.

Once we got started we saw that many (most?) of the cross beams were also deteriorated and we realized that many of the sections that we would want to move when we moved the fence line wouldn't line up.

So, we decided to replace entire the fence as well.

The Patio

A separate job that we had been talking to a local landscaping company was to put a patio below the new deck along with some form of stairs down to the pool area from the side of the garage that would also tie in with the new stairs from the deck.

Looking down from the kitchen (through where the new deck would go (you can see the new footers for the support beams for the new deck) you can see a portion of the old square blue-stone (slate) patio and the walkway to the pool withh those little riverbed rocks that we learned to hate.

And to the right, you can see the grass that Angie hates to mow as well as the overgrown beds in front of the deck.

And you can also see that there's no way to get to the pool when people want to go down to the pool (people had to cross the deck and come down the stars on the other side (which are gone in this picture as the new deck is already in progress.

All the Pics

The full slide show is available here.