Now that the snow is going we started doing some more work on the house. First order of business was the front and back terraces.
The plan was to put down tanalised wood and then cover that with the planks of heat-treated wood. We had checked last autumn the prices and sizes, etc and I had made a rough plan of what we needed. The weekend before Easter there was a large home and garden show in town and there we grabbed more material on the woods and checked out a few more details. The heat-treated wood looks very nice. It is baked to over 200 degrees which gives it similar rot-resistance as other treated woods, but no chemicals. It goes dark brown during the baking and becomes quite light. A similar plan is a fraction of the weight of one of the same sized tanalised planks.
So the week before Easter I made detailed plans on the amounts we needed and what other bits and pieces. And then we went to order it. That started the first problem. I had calculated how many planks we needed, but the shop only orders it by the metre. So converted the plank lengths to metres and ordered that. It was delivered in time for the weekend, which was good. But the length of all the planks was 60cm shorter than all those we had seen during autumn, which was bad.
A quick change to all the plans (most useful thing I have ever used MS Visio for 🙂 and we started work on the back terrace. It wasn’t exactly the way we originally wanted, but it seems to have worked okay. The main deck is done with the tanalised wood directly on the concrete and the heat-treated wood screwed to that. We gave the heat treated planks a quick coat of oil treatment on the bottom to protect them a bit more before screwing them down and will do the top later when we are finished everything.
Progress so far is that the back is almost complete. A few screws missing still. And the surround around the concrete edge has to be done yet. But that involves drilling lots of holes in the concrete for the support bolts. The front terrace didn’t quite get done. We run out of planks with a row short. So will have to pick some more heat-treated wood up this week.
Once it is all done I’ll put up some photos, but here is one of the work in progress on Saturday with some of the oil stain drying on some of the planks. The back deck is done, but under those drying planks. Hard to believe, but on Friday it was about 10 air temp and in the sun it was much, much hotter. Unfortunately by late afternoon the sun was gone again and didn’t really come back all Easter weekend.
