I’m going to do a big post with lots of details about the deck building process, things we learned along the way, and whether we’d go the DIY route if we had it to do over again….but for today I’m just going to show you the pretty pictures.

The back of our house has a screen porch (well, it used to be screened; the screens were in bad shape, so we took them down awhile back and turned it into a covered porch) with a smallish deck attached to it, and it was already in really rough shape when we moved in five years ago:

This meant that we had a deck that we never really used at all. The railings were wobbly, and I didn’t feel like the kids should really hang out there, and also it was just ugly.

But, what with one thing and another (and ANOTHER and ANOTHER; this house needed a lot of help when we bought it), it took us until this spring to do something about it. After much debate, we opted to do the deck repairs ourselves instead of hiring someone; this pushed us pretty much to the very edge of our DIY comfort level….but we did it! Mostly Dave. But the kids and I helped some!

This isn’t a completely new deck; we kept the existing frame and reinforced it as needed, and it’s really pretty much one structure with the covered porch part of things (we’re not sure if it used to be all open deck and someone added the covered part at a later date), so a lot of the support structure stayed as is, as well (we did add some new supports, though, in case you’re looking at the picture up there and thinking it really needs some more support. We agreed. More on that in the second post). But it was still a really big project–the biggest one we’ve tackled around here in quite awhile, in fact. Now that Dave’s finished with his master’s, I’ll have to find more giant things for him to build and fix around here!

Our timing was a little….crazy, because we waited until just a few weeks before leaving for our summer trip to get started…but we finished right on schedule! It was a stressful couple of weeks, but it also felt good to be working on a big project again like old times.

It’s better now, right?

Please keep in mind that this is whole deck/porch thing is still very much a work in progress. There was a more innocent time early in the spring when I had delusions that we were going to have time to repair the deck AND get all the covered porch rehab that needs doing finished and decorate the whole thing before summer. Ha.

We still have so much to do out here (mostly to the covered porch part), but I’m very happy that the deck is safe and useable now, and I’m looking forward to getting to the funner, making everything pretty, parts in August when we get back from our trip. I’ll be talking a lot more about our plans for the space.

Potential, though:

Also, can we talk about how dumb I feel not to have started using Lightroom years ago? This photo out of the camera had the background totally blown out and the foreground with the covered porch all in shadow. But I fixed it, and it was easy!

See my tomato plant out there? And the pots with lettuce and spinach in them? I’m excited about filling the space up with more plants when we get back. And I hope the house sitters get some tomatoes while we’re gone.