Earlier this summer we built a floating deck over an old brick patio. Before I get to the deck itself let me start with all the prep work we had to do.
We have wanted to do this since we moved in 5 years ago and last summer seemed like the perfect time to finally tackle the project, or so we thought. First, we had to remove the rock wall border. Man was that a lot of rocks to move. Where did we put them you ask? Well… in piles all along the back fence…. A project for another time.
Our initial plan was to build the deck from pallet wood, so the next step was acquiring, disassembling, de-nailing, and planning. Josh spent countless hours in the garage doing just that. At this point summer was winding down so we neatly stacked our freshly planed boards and got them covered to store for winter. I was starting to feel skeptical about using the pallet wood, but well it was a project for later and we could revisit it come spring.
Fast forward to this spring. We realized the large maple tree just outside of where we planned to build the deck was growing at a slant towards the house, which of course is problematic, so we wanted to take care of that before we put in the deck. We rented a boom lift from Home Depot and Josh went to work very systematically and in small sections taking down the tree. Removing the maple really opened our yard. It’s amazing how much larger the space felt.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention, we had some stone benches, containing rebar supports, that had been concreted in. As cool as they were, and as much as we would have liked to salvage them, it just wasn’t an option. Out came the sledgehammer and down they went.
At this point the tree and benches were out and everything was cleaned up. Next came leveling the areas for the concrete deck blocks to sit as footers. This was probably the most time-consuming portion of the project, outside of the pallet deconstruction.
Once everything was leveled and the footers in place it was time to build the frame. We used 2x6x10 boards as the joists to frame everything out. While placing the framing we became aware of where we had done a good job of leveling and where we had not, so there were footers that we had to go back and fix, but in the end the framing turned out square and level.
Now it was time to get out pallet boards out from storage. It was at this point that we started to really question whether pallet boards would really work as decking boards. After some calculations of the number of boards we had we quickly realized that we had maybe only half the boards needed to complete the deck. Josh really did not want to proceed to spend another entire summer disassembling pallets, so we priced out deck boards. We came to the conclusion that Josh’s time was far more valuable than the money we would be saving by using pallets and went ahead and bought deck boards to complete the deck.
When we started laying the boards a friend jokingly said to make sure we put the correct side up. While we knew he was joking this led to some research, come to find out there may, or may not be a correct side to put up. Turns out this is quite a debated topic. If you are going to be installing a deck, make sure to take the time to look up the different arguments and make your own educated decision.
All in all I think our floating deck turned out pretty nice, and I can’t wait to get it stained.