Last weekend Ryan and Daryl went to Lowes with me and we picked up $165 worth of material and made the deck 25 square feet bigger. 26 inches by 12 feet, so now it's a 12x12 deck instead of a 10x12 deck. I've been wanting to do this for about 4 years now. I was just going to treat the deck, but there was so much wood that was no good I thought I really needed to replace that wood -- and it would be silly to replace the wood without expanding the deck to the end of the house (why the original builders didn't do that is beyond me except for that it probably saved them $50.) There is a large wild grape vine for privacy that grows up one side and there's a trelis that sat on top of the south rail. That top rail was the one that was the most rotten. Since I wanted to get the vine up for privacy and to block the smell of the neighbor's deck (he lets his pit bulls just go on their unsealed deck and he sprays it off with the hose but that stuff is in the wood now and it is RANK!)
Anyway, I need to wash the old wood now and treat everything which meant I couldn't put the vine back up on the rail... didn't really want to anyway, so I built a support about 6" out from the rail and put it up there. It's working out pretty well. Put some of the deck scrub on some of the old wood last night and it revealed nice yellow wood underneath.... so the wood isn't as far gone as I thought it might be.
Hopefully this weekend I can get it scrubbed and water-sealed or stained (depending on how the old wood cleans up) and we can stick the plants out there and I can get the automated watering system back up and going for the hanging plants.
I did get the trumpet vine trelis up on Saturday, by the way.
Well, off to work.
