Deck Building - Day Two

Okay, time for day two of deck building.  The day that it sorta, kinda, maybe starts to look like a deck.  Day two started at around 7:00 am again.  Another early day.  I wasn't even dressed yet when J's parents pulled into the driveway.  My back hurt, my wrist hurt, my legs hurt.  But I knew it would be worth it.

So how did day two start?  Well we started on of the most important parts, we put some posts in some holes (people, please, get your mind out of the gutter).  This was the most tedious, time consumer part of the deck.  If I thought we measured a lot the day before, I was mistaken.  Everything had to be measured and remeasured to make sure things were level and even.  

Each post had to be measured to see where we needed to cut them.  We had 10 foot boards, but only needed them to be 4-5 feet long, so we could get a couple posts out of each board.  So J would measure the depth of the hole and then add a few inches on, so that we wouldn't come up short on any of them.

Once the board was in, J's dad would hold it straight and then we would slowly back fill the hole.  You get to use a little corner level thing to do this.  It attaches right to you're 4x4 so that you can make sure it's level in all directions.

We did this for all 13 posts.  This took us a looooong time.  In the hot horrible sun.  It was 90 degrees all weekend.  And we weren't even close to being done.

After the posts were in there was more MEASURING.  We had to make sure that the deck was going to be level, so all of the posts had to be measured and cut.  Here's J's dad measuring some of the first ones.  The beams need to rest on the posts, so we needed to measure to the bottom of where the beams had to be in order to know where to cut.  This meant we had to put in a joist, put a mock beam under it and measure from there for all of the posts.

Once we did that we double checked using a water level.  This is just a clear plastic tube that has water in it.  So we went to every post to double check our measurements from before.  Luckily for most of this, I sat in the shade.  I was a tad bit of a slacker on day two.

After measuring and double checking, it was time to cut.  J used the circular saw to cut all 13 posts level.  Then after they were cut, we went back and measured again to make sure they were the correct height.  See, I said day to was a lot more measuring.

This was about as far as we got on day two.  But we had the post in and cut, so the rest of the deck would be a little bit easier, right?!?  You'll have to check back to see.