Rail-ity check

Anyone who's done construction knows that stairs represent a building challenge far in excess of their ubiquity their mundane appearance: not only does one have to calculate spacings for perfectly consistent rise and run (your feet can perceive 1/16" differences in riser height, and trip hazards result if the you're off by 1/8"), but posts and rails take a lot of load without being naturally easy to brace.  Tom had patched the old stairs about five years before now, and had noted how shaky the rails were, even as short as the stair run had been. 

With the longer upper stair he determined that more posts equalled more strength, as detailed in a previous blog.  Here he's made the angle cut on the tops for the right side, and is about to secure the last post, that will hold the end of the handrail as well as link to the deck railing along the rose-bush side.

Getting the interstitial rails to fit without distracting gaps is a finicky task, and Tom spent the better part of an afternoon cutting these parallelograms so they would seat nicely within the plane of the posts, and provide good fastening surfaces for the vertical pickets that will grandkid-proof the stairs and satisfy code.  Clamping the stops and making sure everything is parallel and even requires patience and skill, as I discovered when I did the main steps at the Big House last fall.

Here's the top rail in place.  It's an interesting design dilemma: you want to have a rail that is relatively easy to grip, but you also want it to cover the top of the posts.  If you set a larger cap over the top the look is chunky and small hands can't grasp it.  We could rip a 2 x 6 and have a source for pickets with the off-cuts, and that would give us a little more coverage above the posts, but I'm not convinced.  We've made the stairs wide enough that we could hang an inboard handrail if that seemed like a good idea down the line.

Bench supports

After some family consultation aided by a mockup of a possible new design we built, we broke out the jigs and templates we'd used on the 15-degree angled bench and rail system we'd perfected for the Big House deck.

Here's the workstation up on the badminton court.  We're using new redwood for its dimensional consistency and aesthetics, but slotting in off-cuts of milled wood for non-exposed pieces.  Muggs has cut all the pieces in advance, and then slides them into the jig so that all the angles and lengths and clearances are completely consistent.   He secures them first with construction adhesive and screws, and then drills for 1/2" bolts to ensure that each unit is bombproof.

The tangs of each support fit over a joist and extend below, to be bolted both to the joist and to a strut below the joist.  In this way the strains on the slanted rails are distributed widely (in contrast to the ways the original Big House deck supports were constructed, which localized stress on the ends of 2 x 4s, with harrowingly rickety results after 20 years).  Here he is checking the front edge for plumb before clamping and bolting.

The board along the back ensures that the bench in this dining area will be as straight as we can make it.  Once all the bench supports and rails are in place I will move around with a cutting jig that I built and kept, and will quickly be able to cut off the supports to the correct level at the correct angle.

This view shows the bench supports in place.  When I lay the decking out I planned for 4" boards in the line of the locations of the bench supports, so that I could add the little cross piece underneath (to accept the lower tangs) and then not have to notch the deck boards to match the supports, a time-consuming and frustrating process.  I'll just cut the board, butt it up against the front edge, and re-screw it down, and then cut slightly angled pieces to continue under the bench and out to the edge of the deck

Getting Decklet in a Line

With my ancient laptop swallowing up a few un-backed-up photos, my record is slightly incomplete here, but I'll add a couple more posts to reflect recent work.

For the sake of maintaining an easy path to the work area we had delayed demolishing  the odd-shaped bit of decking that Tom rebuilt about 5 years ago, between the shower and the front of the deck, but one afternoon when I was stymied by lack of the right deck screws I attacked this mini-project. Removing the rusted-in screws demanded some vigorous work with a brace and bit (to maintain enough downward pressure--I now hate regular Philips-heads as they are much more prone to stripping than square-drives or Torx-drives!).

I raised the frame the several inches it needed to match the new deck level, and was able to re-use the Simpson fasteners as well as one of the old joists. Building the structure this way left Muggs' drain system unchanged, and allowed for the eventual re-use of the boards, though the angle turned out to be slightly different.

After running the boards through the planer a couple of times and then rounding over the edges, I could dry-fit the new system, though I wouldn't be able to start pinning them down until I had secured the deckboards between the reference board and the edge of the house (which meant cutting for pipes, making sure the door opened smoothly, and adjusting the widths to reflect the non-straightness of the house itself).  The rains also posed a slight challenge, as the Vycor membrane on the new joists only sticks to dry wood.

Here's a detail of the piece nearest the front door, with the half-moons cut out to fit the vent stack on the right and the electrical feed on the left.  Any windblown rain that runs down the siding boards will be diverted away from the house structure by the flashing we added earlier.

I had to piece and rearrange a couple of boards and add a skinny one to make the end work out, a process made a little more frustrating because I was listening to Giants games during their losing streak.

As I had done on the Big House deck near the driveway, I decided to avoid large exposure of end grain (made worse by the angle cuts in this traezoidal deck-let) and add a "breadboard" edging piece, milled without a roundover so the inner edges meet flush.  I like the resulting look, and it should wear better than raw edges might.

One of the more satisfying operations in any deck job occurs when you finally trim off the ragged edges and achieve a more uniform look.  Giving a haircut this way demands a certain mind-set, and it's often a good idea to set things up and then wait until the next morning before making the do-or-die cut.  This was another example of listening to Muggs and saving myself a mistake.

Deck boards almost all down!

I may have alluded to some computer problems in an earlier post--well, they came back to bite me over the weekend, and I lost some photos that I was going to upload to the blog.  Nothing irreplaceable, and once I finished gnashing my teeth I realized what a First World Problem such matters truly are.

So I got up here Tuesday after having left on Sunday morning--I tarped the deck to avoid having the boards warp in the hot sun (I had run out of deck screws and the local builders' supply was closed for remodeling--and the heat was pretty tough to deal with.  Hence the umbrella, which made it livable!  I made good progress securing boards that I had pieced and placed, and here I am securing the rim joist, after cutting off all the joist tails.  Clamps allow me to make small adjustments to the height so the two perpendicular elements meet evenly all along the way--saving a lot of work on decking.

This was the view this morning--I've brought the remaining milled stock back over from the basement [I'll rebuild my little photo essay on the milling steps, how old deck boards get reclaimed, in another post], roughly arranged by length, and I've put Vycor tape on the bare joists the previous evening in the coolness--otherwise it's almost impossible to work with.

Then comes the process of test-fitting the boards before marking them and cutting them; it's where the creativity and ingenuity come into the process, and I sometimes get a real kick out of it when it's going well.  I realize it's a lot like quilting, the whole process, as one is constantly having to think spatially and determine how individual pieces fit into the bigger pattern.  Making sure the seams don't coincide too closely is one criterion, and another is minimizing the amount of good wood that gets cut off.  That tail extending from the pile is situated that way to remind me that there are a couple of blemishes in the middle, that I have to cut off and use the smaller bit for a stair tread or something. I know most professionals just use new wood or (gasp) manufactured wood products like Trex, which have the advantage of being perfectly regular, but honestly I can't abide that stuff...

Here's the view in the evening: I didn't do a ton more screwdriving past where I was in the morning, but I wanted to fit as much as I could so as to be able to tell Muggs how much to buy.  Turns out there's only a couple more 16' 2 x 6's to buy for the deck boards--the rest is salvaged!  The boards on the far left have some pretty significant knots so they'll be hidden under the bench we're going to put in.  I'll piece together some very thin boards (that had to get passed through the planer a few extra times) to fit the gap next to the house, and I still have the stair treads and the boards for the little deck-let next to the shower to mill down and install, but that will go fast.

Muggs has had a bunch of other clients to take care of while I have been squirreling away on milling and piecing, but he will try to get up here tomorrow to finish stair posts and set up for building the bench supports and rail supports.  I will contribute a bunch of small pieces to those assemblies, and I have to set up for installation of those supports once they're fabricated by Muggs.  I'll have to look at the original estimate but I think we will come out significantly ahead swapping my labor for not buying redwood deck boards--even though we'll be shelling out some significant dollars for rails, bench supports, and bench tops.

If it rains, I have lots of stuff I can still do, and if it doesn't, I'll keep plugging away, including the very satisfying task of setting a guide edge along the rough ends (foreground of this picture) and running the circular saw right along to get them all at once. 

Stairway posts and substructure

We've been punching out big days, with Muggs setting the main stairway posts and securing the bottoms to make them bombproof.

  

One of the classic problems with stairs like this one--shaky posts and rails--won't be an issue thanks to the extra beef (we're putting posts on 4 foot centers) and extra bolting underneath.

This shows all the posts initially placed with through-bolts underneath...

And here are temporary rails that keep the posts from twisting.  They have the additional benefit of serving as templates for cutting the mid-span rails--just scribe the lines and the resulting parallelograms will fit perfectly, and hold the vertical pickets as we grandkid-proof these stairs.

This shot also shows the path I've temped-in from the landing to the garden--we'll probably be able to make stairs out of scrap pressure-treated beams.

These tie-backs will stiffen the whole structure and relieve strain on the stair stringer, and we may join the post bottoms with a piece of wood, just because we can.

Milling! And a milestone....

I dashed back up to Inverness this morning and, mirabile dictu, I did not have anything pressing to do on the cottage, so I could put in a real day's work on the milling that I have been mentioning.

It's actually incredibly satisfying to do this unusual work: we budgeted the job as if we were buying new redwood, not knowing for certain how decayed and weathered the old boards actually were, but the idea was to reclaim as much as was practical, the way I did on the Big House deck. 

Tomorrow I may try to get some shots of the process itself, but meanwhile, here's a quick look.  This is the first stack of milled redwood, which I had de-nailed more than a week ago, but hadn't been able to run through the table saw twice (barely taking off a saw kerf's width of material with each pass, since there's not a lot of rot on the edges), run through the planer several times (some of the boards are deeply sun-scoured), and finish with a roundover bit in a hand router.

This close-up shot actually shows both the beautiful and the ugly aspects of this reclaimed wood: Doffy had used the next-to-highest grade of redwood available, old-growth with some knots, and you can see the striations of weathering in the piece at the far left, the gorgeous tight grain of the good board at center, and the cracked knot in the piece below.  Part of my job is to stitch together combinations of lengths to minimize knots--and sometimes I will rip a 5 1/4" plank down to 4" to get rid of bad knots or severely weathered surface, and salvage a useful board out of something that would be marginal at full width.

This innocuous-looking single run probably ate up a good hour and a half this evening (Go Giants! Coors Field! Home runs!), as it is what I call the Reference Board--as straight as I can make it, and as perpendicular to the joists as I can make it, allowing for the fact that the ledger and the house are both not completely straight.  But having this first board straight is key to the whole rest of the decking: I will be pulling all the other boards to this board (with 1/2" thick spacer blocks), so if I get it wrong, the mistake is propagated through every aspect of the deck. I use a string and sightlines (lying in the dirt here, and standing on a ladder on the far side) and a 3-4-5 square and every method I can, and tomorrow I will double check it before filling in the rest of the deck screws and calling it good enough.

Once I'd put in a few dozen screws in the three boards that make up this line I continued to test-fit five or six more ranks, just because it wasn't raining and the ballgame was still going on--quiet work that won't annoy the neighbors, and that requires rhythm and patience and creativity (to avoid flaws in boards, and to vary the seam-lines so that adjacent ranks don't have breaks in too close proximity).

The black Vycor membrane on the top of the joists is a rot inhibitor--the old deck had roofing paper strips on the joists, so one of my tasks when de-nailing is to peel this tar-y strip off each board so it will run (relatively) smoothly through the planer.  Because the Vycor membrane is super-sticky (and sticks best to itself), I tend to attach it in manageable-length strips of about 2 feet long.  The screws go through this membrane and seal well, which should lead to a long-lasting deck.

Tomorrow I plan to do a mixture of tasks after confirming that we can live with the placement of that first board: I'll de-nail some more of the pile, do an hour or so of sawing, and hour or so of planing, a half-hour of rounding, and a couple of hours of layout, including marking and cutting boards.  Muggs will probably arrive with rail / post lumber in the late afternoon, and I'll ask him to pick up a couple of 800-piece boxes of 3" deck screws so the actual surface can start to get finished. 

Temporary stairs and landing

Today was another drizzle-y day with a fair number of distractions early on (including an hour and a half with an electrician friend, troubleshooting the hydronic heating unit and controllers that had been not-very-wisely installed in the cottage), but I made some progress on little items that should help speed things up next week.  I also didn't want to make a lot of noise on a Sunday (preserving good Neighbor Relations I hope), so I did mostly quiet stuff.

In the previous post I had alluded to a "can't get there from here" challenge in securing the Simpson fasteners for the lower stair stringers.  The side screws are pretty easy, but what about the bottom ones?  Usually these hangers are used in installations like the one to the upper deck, where there's easy access to the bottom of the stringer.  Here, I ended up having to excavate enough to be able to place the compact driver-drill facing upwards and either hold the screw in the hole and then find the head of it with the driver bit, or attempt to locate the hole with the screw already in the driver chuck.  As you might imagine this involved a dignified sprawl in the dirt.

Luckily the Giants game on the radio provided encouragement and entertainment (Yes! Winning three out of four from the Dodgers! Yet another come-from-behind victory!)(After the postgame wrap I would listen to the end of the Warriors' record-tying win in San Antonio--a great day for Bay Area teams.)

I know, I know--this is one of the strangest selfies ever, taken while holding the camera face up in the trench, so I can see which screws have yet to be driven (and no, I did not attempt to remove that mis-driven one).  That is an ivy root sticking up at the top of the picture, I think.

Tom, if you're reading this, aren't you glad you didn't have this lovely job? Actually it wasn't as awkward as I thought it was going to be--and as I say, having the sportscasters keeping me company made for a remarkably pleasant couple of hours, all things considered. 

Besides securing the stringer hanger I improvised a set of temporary stair treads out of scrap lumber, for the lower part using plywood with a 2-by reinforcement to stiffen it over the span.  I did this so we don't have to go around the long way (over the newly exposed septic hatch-covers) and can just use these cool stairs.  Next week Muggs will come up and put in some rail posts, as well as secure some extra bracing while I mill deck boards.

I also moved the excavated dirt away from the bottom of the stairs and over to the top of the driveway, and well use it somewhere.  But for now it was in the way and making me a little crazy.  This photo also shows the plywood I've temporarily placed over the landing frame so that Muggs and I don't have to mince over exposed joists (and risk turning an ankle each time)
 

While I was in housekeeping mode (and while the Dubs were pulling away from the Spurs in a turnover-free fourth quarter!) I also cut chamfers into the top of a scrap 4 x 4 post, and set it to protect the hose bibb at the landing.  The old post had rotted away (literally) and this just seemed like a golden opportunity to catch something on the exposed pipe and suddenly lever the connection to the PVC main that you can see at the bottom.  We'll put in a green valve housing soon but the main thing was to do a little work to avoid a lot of work later.

We've got another week of work at least before we will have to make some decisions about deck rails and benches, but I can see another big burst of work in this coming week.