Possible decking layouts

Ok, so I'm jumping around a bit, but here are the possibilities I drew up. As you see, I didn't go with any of these. The first one was the most complicated and used 2 colors of Evergrain composite.





The next two only used Redwood, but the herringbone design would have required more blocking and work on the substructure. Plus about twice as much time and effort making all of those angled miters.





While basically I went with the last one, I ended up putting three center vertical boards down and mitering the corners where they all meet to make a "box" shape on each half. I think you can see it in the pictures below.

Custom Gate

Yes it sags a little already. I didn't account for a 2 year old hanging on it. This is all made with the same Evergrain Redwood Composite material that I used for the rails. I used the same black aluminum balusters as well. I think I should have used a more sturdy hinge or maybe used some sort of metal plate on the bottom to keep it from sagging the way it does now.

Decking Layout

I started out with lots of ideas, some more complicated than others. First I'll show you the end product, then I'll show you some of the other designs I considered.

Here is the layout we went with.

Design - Substructure

I thought that I would start with a 12x20 standard design. Which it turns out, is how I finished. In between I looked at lots of ideas. Half octagons, small protrusions for seating, 15x20. In the end, 12x20 worked out best for both the space we wanted and the construction that we thought we could take on.

Here is the design that I came up with using the deck building application on Lowes website

Lowe's Design PDF

After talking with the contractor sales guy at Trendel Lumber (who just happens to be my neighbor) we decided on a similar joist structure, but with a cantilever so that we only needed 4 posts.

This is what the substructure looks like now.

Our new Evergrain Composite Deck

I'm a little late in starting this blog. Hopefully I'll have inspection completed tomorrow on our deck. So most of this will be me telling you about our previous experience. From today forward, I'll be telling you about our current experiences.

About a 2 years ago my wife and I started talking about building a new deck. We have 5 year old split level home in NE Kansas. The deck on our house was 10'x12', the rails and balusters were untreated, and boards were already warping. The stairs were added on by the builder during the zero hour before closing. Now I'm going to be the first to admit, I did nothing to prevent the deterioration of that deck. I never treated it, stained, or power washed it. I guess I thought that either we wouldn't live here long enough for it to bother me, or I'd live here long enough to want to replace it.

The latter was the case. Fall of 2007 we had a baby boy, our first born. I spent a couple of weeks home with him in December and had some time, if you can believe it, to do some research online about decks. We had decided that we would like to use some form of composite lumber. We didn't want to be staining and treating the wood every year or two. Our current deck it 10' off the ground and the thought of spending a weekend each year on a ladder staining made me nauseous.

We wend to deck supply stores, huge chain home improvement stores, and local lumber yards looking at decking and talking to people. I posted messages on message boards, read blogs, and reviews from my Family Handyman Magazine. We chose Evergrain decking from Tamko.

Redwood was the color of choice. We really liked Cherry, but it was 25% more expensive and to be honest the color was about the same. My research showed that nearly all composite decking will fade, most of it (at least recent formulas) are mold, mildew and stain resistant, and will cost roughly 3 times more than treated wood.

Next came the design phase. Most home improvement websites offer some form of the same deck design program, online, and free. They are surprisingly good. If I can find my original plans, I'll post them. I went through lots of designs: herringbone, angled, but finally decided to go with a simple design to save time and money.