The new deck - Ah the joys of home ownership!

So you may be wondering why we haven't been putting up any new posts lately... part of it is good news, we were on a long family vacation which we will be posting soon, but the other reason is because all of our free time at home has been completely consumed rebuilding our deck. The old one was built using non-pressure treated pine for a sub structure - basically lumber that one would use to build something indoors - not outside as the foundation of a deck. The substructure was rotting, the decking had seen its better days and was also starting to rot in places, after a lot of unsuccessful brainstorming on how to fix it on the cheap we finally concluded that everything had to go.
Some of these boards were so rotten that weeds were growing out of them! Very Nice! And you've gotta love all the trash that was left under there! Kate was nice enough to help me extract the thousands of screws holding down the decking.


Once all of the old junk was removed it was time to replace the sub structure with some real pressure treated lumber that would last. And then time to put on the new decking and railing.


Finally at last the project is complete! We decided to put a 45 degree angle in the corner by the apple tree. This really made a big difference. It looks a lot nicer. We also didn't want to obstruct our nice view of the park in the back with the railing but still wanted a small barrier along that side of the deck so we decided to build in a little bench seat. It worked out well. The finished product!