The deck that came on the front of the house.
There are certain parts of the house that we knew upon first sight that we would need to replace. The floors that had carpet, for example, needed to go immediately. The deck that someone had haphazardly slapped onto the front of the house was not great, for sure. But we were thinking that it was a few years down the road in terms of replacing. As it so happens, we were in the process of getting rid of the carpet when discovering that the floor underneath was also problematic, as well as the sub floor, as well as the floor joist that the deck ledger was fastened to. The problem: not only was the deck garbage, there was no flashing between the house and the ledger. Further, the deck was built the exact height of the sliding door leading into the carpeted room. As a result, the snow on the deck was melting directly into the house. Awesome. In order to remedy all of the above, replacing (or at least removing) the deck was promoted all of the way to the top of the list. As we were dismantling the deck, we discovered that there was one thing that whoever built the thing had gotten right. The deck was made out of pressure treated lumber, that despite having a crappy paint job was still in pretty decent shape. Britt and I both being individuals who hate wasting anything, began immediately brainstorming about what we could make out of the take-off wood from the old deck.
A load a firewood before being stacked in the shed.
Britt had a pretty solid list right off the bat- a yoga deck, some planter boxes, some deck furniture. My first idea was a wood shed. Since the day we moved in, we had resorted to storing firewood in the shed-shed (not really meant for storing fire wood). Way down on the to-do list, slightly above replacing the front deck I had intended to build a proper wood shed anyway. Now we had the materials to make it stacked in the side of the yard, junking it up. I measured the current space in the shed-shed that was holding what we believed to be about a cord of wood, then sketched something up that would be roughly the same volume. I picked up a couple of pre-fab cinder block footings at the local hardware store and got busy building.
New wood crib after the first day of building.
And here it is from the back:
The night before we really started building, Britt helped me put together the frame for the base, and set all of the footings which was tricky give then uneven ground. The next day, we started putting the thing together. Britt made the cuts while I slapped it all together. The gray pieces of wood are the 2x6s from the old deck flooring, and the white pieces were from the railing. We later picked up some galvanized metal roofing to finish it off. It took me an entire afternoon to move all of the firewood from the shed-shed into the new wood shed. But, man… it was worth it.
[Photos: Jake]
