Finally, after 20 years being in the house, I am putting on a deck. The house was design for a deck to run the whole length of the back. You can see there is a door off the kitchen and the living room which, at the moment, just leads to a 5 foot drop.
Last weekend, two of my sons-in-law, Lyle and Dave, came out to help me dig holes. We rented a two-man auger from home depot and went to work on the support post holes Dave and I had marked earlier. The clay in this area is tough stuff. Good enough to make pottery from. And there were a few rocks.
And when I say help me, I have to admit the two young bulls worked the auger while I cleaned the holes and removed rocks. It was hard work but in the end we had six holes, each 4 foot deep.
A few days later, Dave came by and we cut the tubular cement forms and shored up the sides. Then we placed two of the posts and poured the cement.
We ran out of cement and daylight after that and left the rest of the post placing until the next night.
The next afternoon, we worked on the rest of the holes. We right away ran into a problem: Some of the holes were not in line with what we required. These posts have got to be in a straight line or when we do the framing we will run into trouble. So we had to remove some of the tubes, widen three of the holes, replace and repack the tubes.
Once that was done, we placed the rest of the posts, and braced them when they were true. To do that we used a three-foot level to make sure they were straight, then secured the posts to the bracing and rechecked with the level.
Once all the posts were braced, we poured the cement into the tube forms for the remaining posts.
As you can see, we did a pretty decent job with that.
Today we start the framing of the deck.
I'll keep you "posted"
