Building a Deck - Day 1

So I received the wood yesterday, but since the neighbors had put up TWO posts for their soon to be fence, the forklift couldn't get the wood to the backyard. So I hauled no less than 150 pieces of southern pine from the front yard to the back yard. Which pretty much took all day. Its all covered in tarp to keep it dry while I wait on the permit to come in. 

So the next thing I did was remove a piece of cheap aluminum that was acting as siding underneath the sliding glass door. Good thing we don't have a lot of snow or anything, or the wood underneath it might have started to rot already (sarcasm). 

So what goes here is the ledger, which connects the deck to the side of the house. The ledger will end up going all the way across the house, which means I will have to take down some siding to attach it to the house. This requires a Zip Tool to unlatch the siding. Home Depot doesn't carry it because its considered a 'specialty tool'. So now I'm waiting on Amazon to ship one to me, as well as the permit to actually do anything. 

In the meantime, I'm going to start removing the grass thats around the concrete slab. No sense in having it underneath the deck where it will die anyway. I'm going to attempt to transplant it to the very back of the yard after removing a mass of weeds.

I'm off to Home Depot again... 

Building a Deck - Day 0

So I've decided to build a deck. You might assume, therefore, that I have some kind of experience or expertise in the area. But you would be wrong. Which is why I consider the deck-building experience to be a bit of an adventure. It's something I'll learn as I go, and we'll see what happens. 

Here are a few pictures of the backyard before work begins. The deck will be a 20' x 14' single-level deck that extends out over the existing concrete slab from the sliding glass door. 

Picture of the back of the house where the deck will go:

The deck will extend from 1' in from the edge of the house on the right (so the gutter can still go down to the ground) to 6" short of the window on the left. 

Here is a picture of the hill in the back of the yard. A future wall of some sort will keep the hill from eroding into my yard and act as a rear fence. 

And the side of the house where I'll need to do something to keep everything from washing away:

So its Day 0, and work has yet to begin. I'll try to keep this updated as much as possible as the work progresses. In a perfect world, I'm finished with the deck by the time my mom and brother come to visit around the 3rd weekend in July. Here's hoping...