DIY Deck continued

Part 2 of our deck...

Ok I know I said that I was posting this "tomorrow" which would have been yesterday but I was slightly under the weather so it's a day late, sorry. Well, I can tell y'all are super concerned so, yes I'm feeling better:)

Onward to the deck. I left you with the support boards going in. So, here's the photo run down ... I threw in a pics of the post in the concrete because well because they were on the camera roll so there you go. 

We had to make three notches on the board that went against the post. The first two went smoothly. We used a wood chisel to "pop" the notch out.

If using a chisel then make sure that you put the angled side to the side that you want to remove, like so. 

If all else fails and your notched piece chips then use some wood glue and a C clamp to fix it. 

Go with screws made for the job you are working on. In this case we needed outdoor wood screws. This won't rust and leave marks all down your wood. 

Now, we were working with wet wood so we kept the boards close. To keep the connections tight and even we use the aid of a crow bar...keep it simple:)

Once the decking was tightly screwed into place my Mr got to work on railing. We are using a simple square design.

This is a farm so of course we were joined by our farmily members.

Measure every twice before making any cuts. When you by boards (in our case) that are 2x8x12 you are not getting exactly those measurements. All of our boards ranged from a quarter to three quarters over the 12 foot mark. 

During the build I still needed to get in and out so we came up with these temporary stairs, getto haha.

Another tip for keeping the drilling smooth is to clamp the board down so the screw just goes into the position you want instead of having to pull the board into place. 

Make sure to keep checking the level and squareness of everything as you go along. 

Look at those gorgeousness 45's done with just a skill saw! Way to go Mr. 

Now, I know what you are thinking "is that it?" And the answer is no. We still want to "solidify" the space between the deck and the railing but we haven't narrowed down what we want to use for that. We are tossing around the idea of pallets (which would match the Sud Shack walls) or fence boards (to match the doors of the Sud Shack) or even branches (because when we began clearing our homestead we did come across some trees that had to be removed and we saved all the straight-ish branches).