Out with the old...

I shared a picture a short time ago of my dog and I sitting on our deck watching a sunset. I mentioned that we were in the process of demolishing that deck and I would write a post about it. Well here you go!

My wife and I moved to our house about two or three years ago. One of the things we immediately loved about the house was sitting on the deck and enjoying the outdoors.

It was getting time to re-stain the deck and I noticed that some of the boards in certain areas were starting to rot. It was then we decided that we should probably just get a new deck instead of trying to fix the old one. Wanting to save some money we decided to do all of the demo ourselves. You can see in the picture above that I started by removing the railings from the bottom half.

I had rented a dumpster from a local company and we started throwing the railing in there. I then started working on removing the old deck boards.

The boards by themselves were too long to fit in the dumpster, so I cut them while they were still attached and then started removing them one by one.

I didn't have a proper pry bar, so I found myself removing every screw one by one to get the boards up, it was a long process...

You can see that they had built a shed under the deck at some point. Our new plan for the deck requires it to be at a much lower level, so the shed had to go.

That was the worst part of the whole demolition. They used these tongue and groove beams on the roof of the shed and they were very wet and very heavy. It took four of us to move the roof on the shed and get them pried apart from each other.

After a grueling week of work, we finally have the area ready for the new deck to be installed. My wife and I wanted to go with a artificial deck so that we don't have to worry about resealing it every other year.

It is getting close to camping season for us, so we decided that we should probably have the deck professionally installed. Lucky for you, otherwise I would probably have another boring post about my deck!

The main thing I learned from this process... Always make sure you have the right tools! A chainsaw and a larger pry bar would have made a huge difference!

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