I'm surprised that an inspector was required at all much less for multiple visits.
I might be totally wrong but I think I'm the UK you'd be allowed to just build a deck. Unless it was high enough to overlook your neighbours.
Designing a backyard deck for my house
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: Designing a backyard deck for my house
#12Trees are planted way to close to the deck. Looks nice now, sure, it'll be a regret later.
Thank you for the heads up, this might be a problem in the future that I hadn't realized.
The trees are a flowering pear and a flowering cherry, so I'm hoping not too much stuff falls on the deck. We had a crab apple tree before which is dying now, which is why we planted these trees 2 years ago. They're each supposed to grow up to 20 to 25 foot tall, with a 20 foot spread ...
I might have to figure out if I cut them down now and restart, or do it later when it becomes a problem and restart then ... I might just let them grow and figure out how to deal with the problems later ...
Re: Designing a backyard deck for my house
#13I'm surprised that an inspector was required at all much less for multiple visits. I might be totally wrong but I think I'm the UK you'd be allowed to just build a deck. Unless it was high enough to overlook your neighbours.
Our village (here in the USA) is pretty strict about the inspections. Each deck has to have 3 inspections (holes, framing, final).
If you build without a permit, the village will not allow you to sell the house (each sale has to have a village inspection) until you _tear down_ and redo the work with a permit.
So it's a lot more controlled than other places and they can enforce it by tying up the sale.
Re: Designing a backyard deck for my house
#14Really nice. I build a deck this year too. I would have loved to have a nice blog post like this beforehand. I love his page. Inspires to write. Simple, clean, blog has 2 years break here and there, but writing! Before doing myself, I did not know just how much work it is. It looked so simple. But it took me many weekends over a few months. Digging holes for concrete feet. Mixing concrete (I found its easy to do in a…
Awesome, glad to hear you also had a similar experience. Yeah, I definitely underestimated the work required, and you just have to persist through till the end.
Re: Designing a backyard deck for my house
#15Drafting notes, from a childhood watching my mother and father interact over technical drawings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_drawing_tool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_curve is one of my favorites - any complicated curve you like, essentially, as a template tool, or you can use a flat spline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_spline (you might be familiar with splines as a concept from 3d renderin…
Thanks for sharing! This looks like what we would have been doing in the second year of the class, if there had been one.
Re: Designing a backyard deck for my house
#16I'm surprised that an inspector was required at all much less for multiple visits. I might be totally wrong but I think I'm the UK you'd be allowed to just build a deck. Unless it was high enough to overlook your neighbours.
In places like North America where strict building codes are enforced, there are three important factors that should concern everyone who is thinking of not properly consulting and building to those specifications:
1. Inspectors and authorities will act against your non-codeworthy plans and builds; maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe after a few years. Perhaps they'll level a fine, perhaps they'll order the complete demolition of it by their own appointed workers or contractors, at your own expense.
2. Insurers will never pay out for damages caused to or by your non-codeworthy builds. It is the perfect excuse for them to not pay out. It doesn't matter whether your design has qualities that you can demonstrate are equal or superior to officially recognized standards, you lose.
3. If someone is injured or dies on your non-codeworthy project, you'll fail a ton of personal injury and other legal challenges at your own expense.
Re: Designing a backyard deck for my house
#17I'm surprised that an inspector was required at all much less for multiple visits. I might be totally wrong but I think I'm the UK you'd be allowed to just build a deck. Unless it was high enough to overlook your neighbours.
Our village (here in the USA) is pretty strict about the inspections. Each deck has to have 3 inspections (holes, framing, final). If you build without a permit, the village will not allow you to sell the house (each sale has to have a village inspection) until you _tear down_ and redo the work with a permit. So it's a lot more controlled than other places and they can enforce it by tying up the sale.
Similarly, I've lived in low-lying, high moisture land areas where local authorities were extremely strict about people needing to use only approved footing plans. I've also lived in forested areas with strict codes and rules on fire mitigation and prevention, so tree and scrub proximity was a very serious concern.
Re: Designing a backyard deck for my house
#18One thing I've learned with concrete recently is that the drum mixer is less efficient than the mud mixer. For the drum mixer you prepare batches, the consistency between batches may not be very good. The batch of concrete is pretty heavy too. The mud mixer has a steady dribble of concrete coming out of the tip, you can be doing other things while it comes out. It's not as heavy to reposition either. The consistency…
The water source is also a factor if you're using a portable drum mixer. One batch from a well can be quite different from another batch from a treated water system or a running creek.
EDIT: kids, don't pour fuel into a generator right along a creekside without a funnel or care for the enviroment (~25 minute mark of that video)
Re: Designing a backyard deck for my house
#19Overall you did a great job on this. Impressive if you haven’t done it before. Your retrospective is solid. Using post saddles is the move so the wood doesn’t touch the concrete. Generally easiest and most forgiving to set the concrete pour height with a transit, chalk lines, and use sleeve anchors with saddles (which it seems like you did) so you align things perfectly once the concrete has cured enough to load. For…
Digging 4' deck footings or shoveling 3/4" clear stones all day? It sounds like a recipe for back injury, we should all figure out how to use technology to solve these problems for us instead. I do appreciate the sentiment though. Sometimes just doing it yourself is more satisfying than watching a machine work.