Deck building. Laying in the ledger and joists

Now that the main bearers are down it's time to turn attentions to the ledger board.

As previously posted a fair amount of preparation had to be done for the ledger board for structural reasons. The ledger is required because I couldn't get in close enough to the house to dig post holes due to all the concrete over-pour in the ground from the house slab foundations. The additional engineering complication was due to the window. The local building regulations don't allow the ledger to be put into the bricks under a window, so the ledger had to be bolted into the slab, hence all the prep work.

The floor joists will connect into the ledger using Pryda joist hangers, and to enable this, the bottom of the ledger board needs to line up with the top of the bearers. 

The big question is, what do you use to hold up the piece of timber for the ledger, and keep it level against a flat concrete surface, while you are trying to drill and bolt it down, when there is only a few centimetres clearance? The answer? Whatever you can find laying around!

I used a couple of methods to help. First I marked up and drilled the holes in the ledger timber where the bolts would go. I then clamped a couple of joists to the bearers so they can "push" the ledger against the wall. Next up I grabbed whatever bits of flotsam and jetsam I could find to prop up the ledger timber, all the while keeping it level. Finally I used the product with a million and one uses, which according to Myth Busters is mankind's greatest invention, duct tape, which I use to hold it all in place. Is there nothing duct tape can't do!?

Below you can see the final assembled rig propped up and ready to be drilled.

Is there nothing duct tape can't do?

Once everything was held stable I drilled through the two end holes far enough to mark the slab, and then removed everything. Next I drilled the full holes into the slab using a hammer-drive drill and tungsten carbide bit, down to the appropriate depth, then cleaned them out and fitted in M12 Loxsin's.

Here's a tip for cleaning out the dust from drilled holes in concrete. There's no need for canned air or specialist tools, just grab a decent length of 6 mm poly garden drip hose, put one end in the hole, and the other end in your mouth, then blow! It works like a charm, just watch out you don't get it in your eyes if you're looking down the hole!

With the loxin's fitted in place I bolted on the ledger using the two end bolts, drilled the rest of the holes, removed the board, cleaned the holes, and fitted the rest of the loxin's. 

Before doing the final fit of the board I covered the inside with 110 mm malthoid flashing (per council requirements) then bolted it into the slab with M12 bolts and washers. Lastly I ran a strip of 45 mm Protectadeck stripping along the top and the job was done.

Ledger board loaded

On the "right" side of the deck the ledger board needs to be a little wider owing to the slab section of the landing being slightly lower so I used 110 x 45 MGP 10 treated pine for this section. Using the same methodology as the previous ledger section, I bolted it in as shown below.

A wider ledger was required for the landing

Now that the bearers and ledger are in place I can start laying in the floor joists. Below shows the plan for the joists.

Joist layout

The joists are 90 x 45 MGP 10 treated pine, and there's a lot of them! 33 to be exact. I'm using Pryda joist straps to hold them down, alternating left and right down the joists, and fixing with galvanised clouts. Below I am starting to lay them out.

So excited by joists!

I was so excited to see the joists go down! What can I say, I'm easily excited. The deck is now really starting to look like something. Slowly but surely the joists are creeping along the length of the deck.

Slowly the deck grows

The problem is however, I got so carried away with laying joists that I forgot a very important part. Laying the Protectadeck bearer protection strip along the top of the bearer! It had completely slipped my mind! What to do? Well....I could rip up all the joists I had laid and then put the strip down.....or not? I chose not. 

So I started laying the strip down from the point where I remembered! I'll fix it later somehow.

The joists continue ... with the strip installed

Eventually I hit the halfway point! You can see in the photo below one of the 300 mm noggins I made out of scrap up to help space the joists. I'd lay the next joist down, place the noggin in between it and the previous one, clamp across the noggin, and then fit the joist strap. Some of the joists were a little warped, so fitting the noggin and then clamping at either on the top or bottom (depending on the direction of the twist) of the joist would help straighten it out.

Inch by inch, row by row, one half to go

Using this space, clamp, fit and nail manufacturing like process, I quickly progressed to beyond half way and started moving towards the end.

Panorama. The progress so far.

Joist by joist, strap by strap, nail by nail. Looking ahead, below is where the stairs from the deck will lead down to the lawn area.

Getting closer

Eventually it was all done! There ended up being 35 joists in all, not 33, as I hadn't allowed for fitting around the down pipe near the door, and also I hadn't allowed for attaching a joist to the end of the ledger board which wasn't going to work, so I did have to juggle those around a bit.

Finished!

Next up I have to build the landing and steps for the back door. I've never done steps before, so this will be a new adventure!

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?

The Pain of Dealing with Local Government Bureaucracy!

So let me tell you about this tree we had, and how it relates to the decking to be built.

As I said in an earlier post, all of the "trees of significance" in the housing estate are under a "heritage protection layer" which is managed by the local council. What this means is that if you do anything to any of those trees the council will come down on you like a ton-of-bricks and fine you using a formula based on the thickness of the branches you have cut on any of these trees. There is also an inspection regime, where the council can come onto your property every couple of years and check the trees to make sure you are looking after them. It's a pretty tight (and in my opinion draconian) regime that is meant to stop speculators buying up blocks of land that have trees, cutting them down, and then selling them again for more than they brought them. The fine system makes it prohibitive (and strangled in council red tape) to do so.

Now we had an issue that one of the trees on the property was dead. 

One Dead Tree

It wasn't just pinin'! Its passed on! This tree was no more! The tree has ceased to be! It had expired and gone to meet 'is maker! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! Its kicked the bucket and shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-TREE!! 

Not so according to the council. To them it's a "protected" dead tree.

Now in order to get a "protected" dead tree "unprotected" you have to go through a number of hoops. First up you have to get an arborist report to confirm that the tree is in fact "dead". We used an arborist recommended by the council as I thought it would smooth the waters if it came from someone they were used to dealing with. While the arborist was at it, I got him to check the large Cypress, as in order to build the back deck I was going to need to trim the lower branches of the tree, so I may as well put both trees on the request. One inspection to remove the dead tree, one to trim the other. $300 per tree.

Cha-ching! Arborist report = $600. 
Then lodge a planning permit with the council. 
Cha-ching! Planning permit = $500. 
Attached to the planning permit needs to be the tree removal permit. 
Cha-ching! Tree removal permit = $150. 

So I am going to be out $1,250 without even putting a saw to the tree yet! This is just for permission to put the saw to a dead tree.

After all the permits were lodged the days turned into weeks, the weeks into months. Checking with the council at least on a weekly basis, I was given the standard line "the application is being assessed". 

Finally after six months the council came back to me:

Council Officer - "What's this about a deck?"
Me - "What deck?"
Council Officer - "Your arborists report refers to building a deck"
Me - "It does?"
Council Officer - "Yes, your request to prune the large cypress tree states that you want to trim the lower branches to enable to construction of said deck"
Me - "So it does! What does that mean for getting rid of the dead tree?"
Council Officer - "Well you'll need to amend the planning permit and include details on the construction of the deck"
Me - "What kind of details?"
Council Officer - "It will require all the planning and construction details, what it's going to be made of, where it's going to sit, where the post holes are, how it's attached to the dwelling etc. all in triplicate with the amended permit fee" (Cha-ching!) 
Me - "$&@K!" (after I got off the phone of course)

You see I wasn't actually there when the arborist came around to inspect the tree, my wife was. When the arborist asked why we wanted to remove the lower branches of the cypress tree she unknowingly responded "so we can build a deck", which the arborist duly noted and included on the report, which I didn't read in any great detail. Silly me.

To cut a very tortuous story shorter, four more months went by after creating plans and lodging more requests, and over $2,000 spent, I finally got the planning permit from the council to:

1. Remove the dead tree (yay! "but must be replaced with a similar cypress species" boo!)
2. Prune the lower branches of the large cypress ("but only by a qualified arborist")
3. Permission from the planning department to build the back deck within the protected tree zone ("but a building permit would be required from the building department" and a whole bunch of other conditions about protecting the tree roots etc.) 

HALELUYA!

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Well I said I had a plan..

So here is the plan! First up let's look at the block. North is to the bottom of the page, south the top. East is left, and west is right!

The house is a double story rendered brick veneer house sitting on a roughly 760 sqm block. The yard area is made up of the southern side of the block, what we call the "side yard", and a large area to the rear of the house, aka the "back yard". The back yard is dominated by a large substantial Monterey Cypress pine tree, and there is also a further row of large cypress trees along the southern border of the block, one of which (the biggest of course) is very much dead. More on the adventures of getting rid of a dead tree in a later post! 

All the major trees in the estate are under what is known as a Heritage Protection Layer, meaning "hands off", "don't touch", "don't even think about it!". There's even a fine system based on the thickness of any branch sawn. The more centimeters = more dollars, so above all the trees must be protected. I guess we are just lucky to be blessed with seven of them on our block! Ha! If you look at the large circle that represents the cypress, you'll see an even larger dotted line circle. This represents the "protection zone" around the tree where one is not allowed to build without permission, or else. It also takes up most of my back yard!

In the south eastern corner of the block there is also a hedge of trees that were planted when the estate was built. These are included on a covenant for the block and as such, also cannot be touched. You'll see them drawn in the picture below.

With all this in mind, I put pen to paper and came up with the grand plan.

Each of the numbered items on the plan that represents a section of work that needs to be completed. Generally they are also listed on the order that they need to be completed in owing to access to the block.

1. Circle paving: This is a circular paved area made up of sandstone "crazy paving". There is a circle in the middle which is to have some form of mosaic tiling where a steel fire pit will sit. Seating will be around the edge of the area, and on the northern border of the block will be an area to accommodate a wood-fired pizza oven. Delicious!
2. Back Lawn: This is a large lawned area. The area is "big enough for a kid to kick a footy around or have a game of cricket" as we say in Australia
3. Steps: This is a short set of steps to link the lower circle paving to the higher level of the lawn
4. Stone wall: This stone wall runs the length of the southern side of the house and splits the side into two levels. The upper level retains in all the large trees and the fence, creating a lower leveled area, level with the house
5. Side paving: This is another sandstone "crazy paved" area linking where the back deck will go (item 12!) to a path to link the side yard to another side deck
6. Path: This is a "meandering" loose packed stone path heading up the side yard. It features large wide curves to accommodate garden beds on either side
7. Retaining wall: This is a reasonably high retaining wall of about 1 metre. It will also have a large screen fence in front to separate the "utility" area of the garden from the more formal areas
8. Steps: These steps join the side deck area up to the higher utility area. They are also "crazy paved"
9. Clothes line: The old rotary hills hoist clothes line goes here surrounded by a loose packed stone area in the middle of a lawn
10. Tank: This is a rain water tank between the garage wall on the north side and the new retaining wall
11. Side deck: this is a large 30 odd sqm decked area dominated by a large water feature on the southern side that aligns with the double doors into the front living room of the house. The deck also features substantial garden beds around the edge to "blend" it into the surrounding area. There will also be a high garden sculpture featured just in front of the steps, to give a focal point when looking up west from the bottom of the garden, as well as a lit up focal point visible from the dining area beside it
12. The back deck. This is the big one! 75 sqm of multi-level decking to join the side and bottom yards to the door at the back of the house, and also the front of the house via the existing fence and gate on the northern side. There will be a landing from the back door, leading down some steps to the deck proper, and another set of steps leading down to the lawn area
13. Bottom steps: These steps will be integrated into the embankment to link the deck to the circular paved area below

So there you have it. Quite an ambitious plan! At this point I am planning on Stefan doing all the hard scaping (paving, stone walls etc.) and I'll look after the decking and fencing myself. Let's see how it goes!