Deck Replacement (Part 2)

This post leaves off where <<Part 1>> ended.

First up, I marked the locations of all the joists that would be run out from the house. These were placed no more than 16" on center, and occasionally less where obstacles got in the way. There were several utilities on the side of the house that I had to work around. Once all of the spots were marked, I attached the header brackets, and started putting up the joists.

Deck Replacement (Part 1)

As you can see in the pics, the main deck on the house was in dire need of attention

Occasional Interruption #1 (Tree Fell Down)

Occasionally things get in the way of the progress. Here's one that held me up for a few days.

During a crazy storm, a rather large tree came down. It took out a second tree when it came down.

Shed Removal, Garden Addition

When I bought this property, there were five outbuildings on it. One was a garage with a dirt floor, and one was a garden shed on a concrete pad; these I will discuss in future posts.

This post is about the other three. There was shed that was about 14'x8', with a 6' high roof. There was a second shed that was slightly smaller in width and depth, and that was less than 4' high. The last one was a dog house, in a dog run enclosure. The first two had dirt floors.

These buildings were a real eye sore in the back corner of the lot.

Cleaning the Porch

At some point in history, someone thought it would be a good idea to use construction adhesive to glue exterior grade carpet to the concrete floor of the front porch.

I can't imagine that this ever looked better than the concrete would have on its own. The blue, gray, and black carpet definitely looked out of place after I had the house resided.

Painting the Exterior Brick

This update will depict how I made the very dated brick on the front of the house look modern. The only real option here was to paint it.

Step one was to determine which color I wanted to go with. I had done this back when I had gutters put on the house. I looked through the sample colors available for the gutters (which I got from the gutter contractor), and picked what looked the most appealing at the time.

Block Retaining Walls

I started with a real mess. It's hard to tell from the picture, but the original wall had separated from the house. It was cracked up, and had sagged.

The concrete that ran up to the wall had sunk several times in its history. At some point someone had repoured concrete over the original stuff, in an effort to raise it back up.