Deck Part II - Laziness/Cheapness Breeds Creative Thinking

The inspection went well yesterday. I expected some measurement verification, but the inspector basically just stared at it for awhile and said it looked good. That's fine by me, now I can move on to the decking!

I grabbed one of the 12 foot decking boards for the lower section of my deck and threw it on to see how much overhang I'd have. Unfortunately, the result was a negative number. When we initially designed the deck, we planned on having it extend to the corner of our front porch. When my dad and I were in the design phase, we decided to extend it over the corner about 6 inches to cover up some ugly landscaping timbers below the deck. When I attached the rim joist to the ledger against the porch, I overlapped it, adding another 1.5 inches to the total span. When I threw on that first decking board, I was about 1 inch short.

Immediately I panicked just a little bit. I have 41 boards at 12 feet, and no easy or cheap way to bring them back to swap them for 14 footers. I really didn't want to have to do that, so I had to think about a design change. Luckily, I had already added bracing between the rim joist and the joist before it every 16" to add some strength to the stair stringers off of the side near the driveway. I screwed a decking board down perpendicular to the porch using the bracing for the stair stringers for screws. This allowed all of the boards parallel to the house to be 5.5 inches shorter than before. Problem solved!

Well, not totally. With the decking boards being 5.5 inches shorter, and the joists being 16 inches apart, I had each board hanging over their last joist by 10.5 inches. The bracing for the stair stringers would catch most of them, but the ones that it didn't would be very bouncy and likely dangerous down the road. One well placed foot could potentially break right through the deck. The solution to this was to add another board perpendicular to the porch next to the other. This brought that overhang down another 5.5 inches, making the overhang less than 4 inches. Even a foot placed intentionally on the overhang didn't cause any bounce or bend.

One final issue is that the stairs that will run parallel to the porch are also a tad longer than 12 feet. Well, technically, the two sections of the deck are about 3 inches apart, but we wanted to overhang the decking on the lower section of the deck so that it spanned that gap, making the lower deck look butted up against the other. So if we don't overhang the boards on the stairs, everything will work out. There will be a 3 inch gap in the deck stairs where an animal could potentially sneak in, but I'll throw an extra piece of lumber behind the stringers where there is a gap to close that up. With closed risers, there won't be any way under the deck.

Another option would be to add more bracing between two of the stringers and do another two boards perpendicular to the porch down the stairs, which wouldn't be terribly difficult, but it wouldn't look very good in my opinion. I have some time to think about it, though, since I'm not to the stairs yet.

I'll post a picture later tonight of the solution if I remember. People actually do what I did on purpose sometimes. When the outside boards run perpendicular to all of the inside ones, they call that "picture framing." Mine won't be fully picture framed, and it won't look exactly the same, but it'll be cool enough.

Check back for more updates, and don't forget about etsy.com/shop/ArtistiCass where things are creative on purpose.