Decking finished!

Decking project is now complete (well ish). Three days of labouring in the sunshine, which was very hot work but actually really nice in many ways. It’s great to be out of the office, doing something constructive. That said if I never have to sink another metpost in my life, that would be just great by me…. They’re never easy, to be fair on the metpost, it’s more the problem with any random part of garden being suitable for sinking a post 600mm. Basically there was a whole load of concrete exactly where I wanted to sink posts. And not just random bits, one hole required me to go through a good 6 inches of hardened concrete (very stoney). That probably took longer than any other single activity. One minor hiccup which I am still kicking myself over was failing to actually check the decking timbers were the width they claimed. I knew the lengths would be random sizes at least as long as I’d ordered, but I did all my calculations based on the stated 150mm width, built the whole deck structure and started laying the decking planks only to realise that they weren’t going to cover the whole joist structure….weird… until I measured and found the deck joists were actually only 145mm wide, doh! I really should have measured. It wasn’t a really big deal in the end, one extra board, and some judicious use of the table saw and we were sorted for making up the difference.

The cool thing in the project was that my partner Kat had the idea of using a webcam stuck out of the study window to take time-lapse photos of us working. She’s put a bunch of the coverage on her own blog The Philomathic Kat And I’m sure we’ll both blog about it when we cut together the video. But it looks pretty cool.

When I get around to firing up my laptop, or going upstairs to the mac, I’ll add some pics of the decking project in progress.

Update: finally got around to adding some pictures in progress