Let's build the side deck step 1. Dig some holes.

It all starts with a plan, and below is the original detailed sketch I created for the side deck (see my earlier post on landscape design software). I had grand designs for an upright water feature with interconnected reflecting ponds. It would have looked beautiful with the dark pools within the deck! However in the grand scheme of things I decided against it and put them in the too hard basket! The plan for the joists was driving me mad and the low clearance would have meant a lot of excavation and piping to plumb it all together.

The grand vision for the side deck

I'm not going to throw it all out completely though. I'll keep the idea of the two garden boxes set into the deck in front of the windows and also the large upright water feature at the top opposite the double glass doors as it will give a nice focal point. The south and west sides the deck will be surrounded by garden beds between the rock wall and retaining wall, level with the deck to make it "sit into" the landscape rather than "sit on" it as most decks do.

Looking at the plan below you can see the final shape of the deck resembles a slightly lopsided T.

There are 24 posts required on roughly 1.2m centres which will support 8 bearers. The posts are 100x100 F7 wet treated pine, and the bearers are dual 90x45 MGP10 treated pine, cantilevered off at the end of the posts. The cantilevered ends are because I can't get in that close to the edge of the house or the stone wall with a post-hole digger, and I'm not in favour of running a ledger board along the wall due of all the windows involved. The only exception is the short ledger which I will attach to the concrete pad in front of the door to the garage. All the joists are single 90x45 MGP 10 treated pine on 450mm centres. The decking will be 90x19 merbau.

Side deck frame plan

For digging holes the holes for the footings I had a couple of choices being that I could hire a post hole digger, or I could actually buy a post hole digger. Looking at the number of holes I had to dig I chose to buy one. They sell them pretty cheap in Australia at Bunning's for around $360. Hiring one over the three days was going to set me back around $400 as well as having trouble getting it into the backyard as it's a cantilevered digger, so in my mind I was coming out ahead as I got to keep it afterwards. The only drawback was that the auger bit only had a diameter of 200mm, and really I needed 300mm, so I was going to have to add a bit of muscle to the holes afterwards.

16 holes done. Only 8 more to go. Time for a beer.

Notice above the yellow tool leaning on the retaining wall? A damn jackhammer! Why did I need a damn jackhammer? ROCK! Not the rock and roll kind of AC/DC rock I like, but the kind of damn rock that you hit when digging damn holes. All that white powder is pulverised sandstone.

If you haven't guessed, I didn't have a damned fun time putting down the footings! Here's a bit of a hole-ology (a new word I made up).

Concrete!

• Hole #1. The first hole in the corner I dug I hit concrete. The house is built on a concrete slab, and let's just say that the guys who filled the formwork with concrete were none too neat when they poured the slab, leaving a substantial overpour. I had to chip through with the crowbar by hand.

• Hole #2. I had a bit of room so I started the posthole digger. It went down about 10cm and then sat there spinning and spinning. Getting down on my hand and knees I discovered the sandstone. Not just a small bit either, this was literally a boulder about 2m long by 1m wide and an unknown depth, sitting right where I needed to dig the hole. So I headed off to my local Kennards and picked up the biggest M F jackhammer they had and started in on the boulder. What a pain in the A! Sandstone is relatively soft, so the pick would dig right down and get stuck. So I had to drag the jackhammer up, move a little left, and start again, drag up, move, repeat. Eventually hole #2 was done. Phew! While I had the jackhammer I went back and cleaned up Hole #1 from my manual work with the pick. Much easier!
• Hole #3. When Stefan created the area I asked him to put in ag pipe for drainage and to plumb it into the stormwater. Of course I hit it with the posthole digger and it got tangled up in the auger. Suffice to it ended up being a bit of a mess and the hole substantially wider than it originally needed to be!
• The rest. Thankfully The rest went relatively smoothly with only the odd tree root and small rock for the digger to hit and attempt to rip my arms off. A very rough start!

I had put aside two weeks to put down the footings and at least get the bearers down. The timber turned up for the posts and bearers, and I was still digging holes.

Delivery day, usually exciting!

Once the holes were down I mixed all the concrete by hand in a wheelbarrow with a spade, made from pre-mix bags. Roughly 2 bags per hole. 50 bags of concrete, and two weeks later, I had all the posts in at last.

This was going to take longer than I planned! Doesn't everything?