When I decided to take a year off to study AI / ML, as part of the deal I cavalierly told my wife that I’d redo our deck.
It was a deck that I built 20 years ago shortly after we moved into the house:
The years had taken a toll on the thing, and it sorely needed work. My original plan (ha!) was to simply pull up the wood decking and replace it with Trex. It wasn’t long before that naive plan got scuttled.
As anyone familiar with Trex knows, you need max 16” o.c. framing, because it does not have the structural integrity that 2x4s do. My original framing was 24” o.c., so a lot of additional framing was needed.
Soon afterwards, scope creep set in. A few years after I’d built the original deck we had a new room added to the house, abutting the deck. As a result, my original layout didn’t make so much sense any more. Why not change the design a bit; wouldn’t it be better if we moved the stairs from where they are to over here? And while we’re at it, bump out the other side of the deck a bit?
You see where this is headed. What started as a simple two week project morphed into a month-and-a-half effort.
Here’s the old deck coming up:
Doubled-up framing in place (finally):
Refactoring framing to accommodate design changes is way more of a pain than refactoring code… I’m thankful the latter doesn’t involve digging holes, setting posts, pouring cement, etc.
New stairs:
Local friends taking in all the changes (sorry for all the disruptive activity, guys!):
It was a bit of a slog at the end, and it drained more of my sabbatical time than I thought it would, but I’m happy with the final product.
