The Vacation Project

 This is a picture of the deck on the back of our house, it measures 8' x 12'.  It had a rail around it and a set of stairs coming down this side.  We are enlarging the deck to reach out to our small swimming pool and also coming toward you in this picture another 8'. We started on Monday with our measuring and then ordering the supplies and they were delivered Monday afternoon.  The middle supports were not under the original deck.  We got those put in on Monday afternoon.   This deck has been in place for about nine years. It had sagged and settled and was an awful thing to level and straighten. We finished all of that by noon on Tuesday. We had torn the stairs off, so we had to get up and down off of the deck using the step ladder shown in the foreground. Jordan just loved going up and down the ladder.

 Our oil tank was originally set on old railroad ties.  Over the last ten years they had started to rot and were in real bad shape.  Monday the first job we got done was to jack up the tank, take the ties out, and put in some solid blocks.  That was a real job in itself, but we got everything in and taken care of so that should be good for another ten years.

 Tuesday we had to jack up the old deck, cut off some of the supports so that the end away from the house would be level with the rest of the deck.  There was a lot of crawling around underneath that deck the last two days.  We finally got it pretty close to level all the way around. 

 After the leveling process was done, then we put the old stairs (that fit perfectly) on the other side of the deck with blocks underneath the end. That made it a lot easier getting up and down off of the deck. 

 Here you can see the start of the framework that will support the addition to the east end of the deck.  We got the brackets attached and then we leveled the frame and got it all anchored and braced so that we can proceed with the 2 x 6 joists on top.  The picture below shows the new blocks in place under the supports that we had to cut off.  Keep watching for more updates, we did more work after I took these pictures.