The re-purposed deck has come a long way!

It has been about 2 years since we built the addition and the old 10 x 16 deck was pushed aside. It remained in the edge of the yard for a long time. An eye sore it was! I wanted to cut it up and haul it off, but never got around to it. Meg suggested we move it into the woods and re use it.

So about a year ago I rolled it into the woods using pry bars and 4 inch PVC pipes. We finally came up with a good location for it a few months ago and I moved it to it's final resting spot. Last month I jacked it up and leveled it and set footers under it. Made the posts out of cut offs from recent jobs I did, all scraps. So it set there with both the ends two 2 x 6s missing, they were removed to unbolt the deck from the house and to remove the awful old hand railings!

Recently I built this deck in the woods with benches and suggested to Meg we build a small bench before we close up the ends.  We came up with a U shaped bench and I gathered up the material to build it. The short pieces used were all left over scraps from other jobs.

The old deck boards are really old. The 2 x 10 that is resting on the ground at one corner actually says it is treated for ground contact, normally ground contact is only 4 x 4sand 6 x 6s not the framing lumber. That 2 x 10 had a date stamp 1984! The dark spot in the middle is from where we used to have a suet feeder hanging above the deck, that does not pressure wash off.

Closer details on the bench shows the left over decking boards on the short end of the bench. NC building code requires decks over 30 inches off the ground to have hand railing, the benches make the deck no longer 30 inches off the ground unless you are standing on the bench. I also projected the benches back off the deck 3 inches, this gives you more room on the deck and makes it easier to clean under the benches too.

Here you can see the rest of the work I still need to do. Dig out two more footings and secure 2 more posts made from left overs. The section on the right was part of the ramp we removed it is 4 x 10 foot and set down one step down from the now 10 x 14 deck.  The 6 x 6s used as bench posts have 3 notches cut in them, one notch to set it on the 2 x 10 band board on the deck and the other two to set 2 x 6s on for the bench frame.

So here you can see I did shot the entire deck I was hiding the mess there.
Here is a list of the stuff I had to buy to refurbish and customize this deck.

3 - 2 x6 x 16 treated pine (replaced deck boards)
1 - 2 x 8 x16 treated pine (replaced deck boards)
4 - 2 x 6 x 12 treated pine for bench frame
1 - 6 x6 x 8 treated pine for bench supports ( I had a 2 ft piece of scrap)
6 - 80# bags of concrete
And about $60 worth of decking screws, 5/8 inch galvanized bolts
If I was paying someone to move and build this as shown above it would have been around $1500 labor or more.

Tomorrow I plan on finishing refurbishing the old picnic table Meg has had for years. It has a metal frame and was made of oak and varnished at one point. The benches for the picnic table are done, I used treated pine decking boards to replace the oak