Tearing down a deck

Neither my husband or I are craftsmen, builders or carpenters. I know nothing about construction and home repair. I don't even know the names of tools. Let alone how to use them. Neither does my oldest son who proved this to me by a big blood blister on my thumb due to one mighty whack with a hammer. Ouch! My caring husband just laughed and said "I always move my hand before he tries to hammer nails." Really good advice there, now please get me some ice.

So why did we think we can take apart and rebuild a deck? It comes down to the dollars. To save money.

Uff da. Here we go.



This is a 25 year old badly built deck. It was strong when I was a child but hardly used. So it got neglected and no one took care of it. The boards rotted and splintered. Bees have nested in it. Vines have grown through and weakened the boards.



It is so bad and unstable I won't let the kids walk on it. I run to them when they walk up just 3 rickety old steps with a rail that was ready to fall down, very wobbly.

The first step in putting up a new deck is taking down the old. So Jay and I walked out there with sledge hammers and crowbars and started whacking away. Some might think it is therapeutic but it was tough. The railings all came down really easy but the floor boards gave us a struggle.



We pried the horrible boards off that were nailed on with long 4 inch nails every few feet!



It took us 2 days.

We ran into nests and bees buried in the wood. They came out and swarmed us many times. This sent us running inside and would delay us each time. Finally we could run in no longer. We got the pulled the boards off all the way to the door.



Finally we got all those boards up. The desk is coming apart. Next we pulled off the face boards. They came off pretty easy too. We pulled them with umph as we new this is the end. We are stopping here.




Over a ton of lumber we loaded up in the back of our truck and with two trips to the dump it was all gone. Now how do we rebuild it?