EPTBasically our house has a farmers porch on the front of it, here is a photo that i took while the house was being built 6 years ago. the porch isn't in this picture , because it isn't complete yet (wish i could go back to this day and make a decision about what i wanted to do, instead of redoing a ton of work)
House during construction
anyhow, the deck ended up being completed, and faced with regular deck boards in a horizontal pattern, it looked something like this. (not my actual deck, couldnt find a picture)
Deck Boards
I knew rebuilding the deck was out of the question, so what i wanted to do was reface the deck with composite deck boards, composite deck boards are made from wood/plastic/recycled trash etc, and composted into what feels like a plastic board, this are better for weather, last longer, don't rot, etc. they're also ridiculously expensive (even though more than 50% of it is made from recycled trash).
i shopped around a ton for these, there are some name brand ones.
Azek
Trex
Veranda (Home Depot House Brand)
ChoiceDek (Lowes House Brand)
from what i could tell, these were all basically the same. Azek and Trex were VERY expensive, the home depot/lowes brands were more competitive. I shopped around for about 4 weeks trying to find one i liked that was affordable. After visiting the stores over and over again something amazing happened. Home Depot basically marked these boards down to half price. I talked to the guy in charge of the section and he basically explained that there is a new style of "veranda" coming out, and they were told to get rid of this existing style. This was still earlier in the year (winter) so i knew if i committed to this "discontinued" brand, that if i ran out of boards at any spot in my project i'd be pretty fucked as the new style looked completely different.
so i did what any sane person would do. I purchased every board they had, and then went to 2 other home depots and also bought every board they had.
no idea how much this came out to, or how many actual boards i got, (or for that case how many i actually needed) i did some "very" basic math in my head to try to calculate if i had enough to cover the area i wanted to, and it sounded about right. I bought about 85% grey boards, and about 15% brown boards, the idea in my head was to do a brown trim with a grey deck.
this stuff sat in my garage for 3-4 months until the spring when it was time too reface the deck.
the first step of the project was removing the existing boards. this meant pulling all the nails out of the deck by hand. let me just say, this was fucking retarded..
i used something like this,
Nail Puller
which may or may not have been the correct tool for the job, and pulled out what was probably 5lbs of nails, the person who built my deck obviously used a nail gun, and since it takes almost no effort to shoot a nail into the board, they made sure everything was "real" secure,
it took me about a week off and on to remove all the boards (several broken nails etc). my process was to basically hammer the small claw end under the nail, and then pry it up using the bar. this was basically the largest amount of work for the whole project.
once the boards were off i began to plan how i was going to lay the new boards. i originally wanted to go for a brown trim with grey boards, but at the last minute decided to try to lay the boards diagonally. this was risky as hell because i had a limited amount of boards and no way to get extra if i needed it, as home depot stopped carrying this months ago. i thought it would look much better though so this is what i did.
the end result was this.
Deck1
Deck2
this took about 4 days and alot more wood then i thought, i lined every single screw up with every single board , i was really really careful about this, you can still see my lines in the 2nd picture, i put alot of screws in and i'm really happy with the way it came out. unfortunately it took ab it longer then i thought (ended up taking a week off for this and it took the whole week to do what you see here) so i basically stopped and didnt finish t he steps or bottom area at all. it stayed like this for OVER A YEAR. (yes there was really no way to get into my house from the front door for over a year) i had wood leftover in the garage, but since i used more then i planned, i wasn't sure if i'd have enough for the steps/bottom, and i was lazy.
this is the end of project 1.
