Despite the dreary, rainy weather we've been experiencing this spring in New England, this weekend I extended our 10' x 10' deck. It now is a 10' x 11' deck.

Deck Background:

Two summers ago, I built this deck with Dek-Block piers.  It was the first time I had built anything outside of my junior high school days of wood shop. It was fun and very easy to do. We modified the plans and built a stair that wrapped around the entire deck.


My approach:

Well, since I built the deck I knew that building on top of one of the existing stairs is an approach we could take. Those stairs have very good support. Since the garage is the problem, I had to extend the deck area parallel to the garage.




Since I knew the existing stair is 2" x 12'"x 10', I used a 2" x 12" x 12' foot piece and cut it to 10 feet long. For support, I used 4" x 4" lumber and placed them underneath every 2-3 feet using very wide sturdy brackets to secure them to the existing stair. Then a 2" x 4" x 10' lumber for the face. With the left over wood and some extra piece I had in the garage, I built a small step.



This took me about 3 hours to do alone. All lumber used was pressure treated purchased from Home Depot. I had loads of fun and am satisfied with the end result. I would have loved to build another step that wrapped around the deck; however, financially it just was not feasible. I'll leave that for next year.

So, Step 2 is to put the gazebo together. This will be challenging, since the forecast shows rain all week.

Signing Off,
vivian