Let's Build a Deck: Let's build the side deck step 4. Blinging your deck

Bling - Verb (used with Object): to dress or adorn in a flashy way
Classy - Adjective: of high class, rank, or grade; stylish; admirably smart; elegant.

Obviously there's more to building a deck than just a hammer and nails. Even the simplest construction needs a little "bling" added to make it look an inviting and serene environment. It needs to be a place where you want to hang, not just a place you walk through to go and hang out the washing!

The grand plan has always been to have a water feature included as part of the deck. I visited multiple places around Melbourne that sold water features such as garden centres and specialist suppliers etc looking at different options. The options were somewhat limited as I had specific sizing requirements to fit in the area I'd left aside between the edge of the deck and the stone wall, which was only 410mm wide.

I eventually settled on a three column concrete feature from Pond Art Water Gardens which at 400mm deep that was going to (just) fit nicely, and have that lovely "Asian" look about it I was after.

These features are made in Indonesia and imported by Pond Art, so you need to give them a bit of lead time to arrive. They're also made of cast concrete and weight a ton, so please don't try and install it yourself! It's a specialist job and one I was happy to pay the $220 for (and save my poor aching back).

David and the team from Pond Art turned up on time as agreed and got straight into it.

Delivery day

The water feature has a hefty weight to it being made of reinforced concrete so takes a few burly blokes to get it out of the truck. One, two, three HEAVE!

Manhandling the thing off the truck!

Not a job you can do on your own!

Being shipped over from Indonesia the water feature comes really well packed. Nothing a circular saw can't deal with though! Below you can see the columns being released.

Release the Fountain!

The first step is getting the basin of the fountain in place. There's not a lot of room to move there as the feature is 400 mm deep, and I left a 410 mm gap for it to fit into! You can see David from Pond Art's fingers getting jammed in behind there.

Dave: "Jeeze there's not a lot of room back here mate!"

With some judicious wiggling from the guys the basin goes in like a glove, sitting nicely on the concrete pad I laid just the weekend before; and I might add, sitting dead level with the decking.

Basin installed and level! The guy (me) who put in the concrete pad was awesome.

For setting the towers up there were a few different options as they are differing heights. I chose to have the tallest in the middle with the shortest on the left, and the middle tallest on the right. Below you can see the tallest tower in place. They're packed in using precast concrete spacers to hold them in place.

First tower installed

The rest of the install is all about manhandling the towers into place and getting them all even and level. There's a set of plastic tubing that the water travels through from the pump, that plugs into the tubing embedded within the towers when they were cast. Below you can see the team doing the final assembly.

Getting the towers spaced and levelled (ignoring David's butt-crack please!)

After everything is settled, balanced, and leveled, the pump is then plugged into the 240v power and the basin filled with water for the final test! IT WORKS! I then ran the cable (the pump comes with a 15m cable which is great) under the deck to the external power point I had fitted earlier when building the frame.

The last thing to complete the deck is to apply the finish. To start I gave the deck a light sand with an orbital sander to remove any scuff marks that happened during construction. I guess I could have hired a floor sander, but there really wasn't a lot of mess to clean up so I just used a domestic sander. It probably took half a day on my knees, but it worked really well.

There's a great sticky post on the Renovate Forum regarding preparing, cleaning and oiling your deck if you ever have to undertake this, that has lots of great options and plenty of product feedback. It's worth reading from top to tail.

After the sanding I applied a coat of Feast Watson "Merbau on Merbau" which gives it that lovely dark look and brings out the golden colours in the timber as you can see below. It goes on as easy as pie using a deck oil applicator on a stick.

Be warned that this stuff stinks to high heaven with a nasty chemical smell. If you're sensitive to chemical smells I'd advise getting a respirator to wear. I had to stop a couple of times to get fresh air and had a shocking headache after I finished.