Deck beginnings

I'm posting this in August, and we've been entertaining on our "new deck" since mid May. So we were working slowly on the "new room" - and had decided to extend the deck out from the french doors - the deck line was going to be higher than the siding, and so we had to replace the siding before we could start the deck. And it felt at the time like a never ending process. It always feels like WHY ARE WE DOING THIS AGAIN?! midway through a project. Or seven projects in our case, haha!

So we once the siding got delivered, we started with that, and finished. I'm bad with posting the pics of the finished stuff, I need to! Once that was done, we went back to picking away at the room inside. And then we had a little covid scare - Brian was driving around in his truck all day with a coworker, who that night came down with a fever and tested positive for Covid. So it was time to stay home for 10 days in case he were to catch it - and what better way to spend quarantine than building a deck?

Empty bags of concrete.

Now, none of these renos were "surprises". We had planned them/knew we'd be doing them...so last March 2020 when Covid hit and things started shutting down, we noted the slight, at that time, rise in lumber prices. Mr. Construction Pro (Brian, if that weren't obvi) asked around and determined prices wouldn't come down - and would only go up from here for a long long time. So we hurriedly ordered all the lumber we'd need for the deck. It was delivered and sitting in massive stacks in our yard for a year. Of course it was. Lol. Green lumber need to dry out anyway, right?!

Spring 2021, and we were finally ready to put that sucker up. Right when lumber prices were through the roof!

With 10 days off from work, Brian set to work. Now, I am bad with dimensions. But I'll post pics and vids...this is no normal sized deck. It goes from the far edge of the new room, 6 ft out, and then all the way to the edge of our house (our bedroom). It's HUGE. But Brian is a true pro. And you wouldn't believe we went from this pic here, of him drilling the holes on a Monday, to a completed deck 8 days later. It was truly impressive to witness.

The site of the new deck! 

Although Brian is obviously the brains behind this all, we all did quite a bit of work to pull this off. We made some last minute decisions/additions to our initial plan, like those tall beams to make a shade area - He had the lumber "extra" so why not?! Teamwork really accomplished a lot, quickly. It was satisfying to see, compared to the slow progress of the new room - but it's also the difference 10 whole days off of work makes, instead of nights and weekends. If that were the case, we'd still be building the deck, guaranteed!

Thompson's WaterSeal Timber Oil in Walnut, Semi-Transparent is what we chose, and we had bought 5 of them last year - we were 2 short:-/ Lowes to the rescue for the additional ones we needed!