A Farewell to Deck

When we bought our house we loooved the deck! It was definitely one of, if not THE, nicest decks in the neighborhood. It was Trex (or so we thought) which is so nice for bare feet and no maintenance, too. Oh yeah!

I particularly liked the two levels, it was like a dining room and a separate living room.

But before our first summer was over we noticed some cracking and bowing of the planks. Over the winter there was a visible difference in the size of the planks versus the size of the planks during the summer. We actually covered one of the broken planks with an inverted flower pot to keep the kids from tripping. Classy!

Well, it didn’t take long before we realized that our lovely deck needed to be repaired. While we got estimates and proposals we slowly pieced together the whole story.

The deck was not original to the house. The builder used a recycled, plastic planking that was inappropriate to the weather conditions in Colorado. The deck was replaced once, never paid for and the builder went out of business. The deck never had a final inspection and would actually not have passed if it had.

We moved from repair to replace rather rapidly. (Ogle that awesome alliteration!)

Work started on the new deck last week. When I went to take some “before” pictures, I could feel the steps leading from one level to the next sagging as I walked on them. Yikes!

Goodbye old deck!
(you can tell how bleached out the planks were – in the corner there used to be built-in benches)

Hello fancy, steel frame!

Giant Hole of Nothingness

So that’s the big news around here – we’re getting a fancy pants new deck. Every morning at 6:58, I hear car doors slam outside my house. At precisely 7:00, the hammers start hamming and the saws start sawing. There is work being done on the front porch, too, which involves cement drilling. You know all our neighbors are loving us about now.

More pictures to come later as the deck progresses…

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