High Priority – Designing a Deck

My semi-retirement is off to a good start, one of the things on my list of must do’s is getting the design of a new deck going as well as built.  My house is a little bit over 40 years old, and my other half has an idea that the deck is original to the house.  You might suspect that a deck that old is in prime shape for one thing: replacement.

Oregon weather is a bit “wet” to say the least, so I have been sacrificing some of my writing-time for learning various things to see if I can use them to “build a better deck."  I’m also planning on doing some travel this summer, so getting plans around this deck done soon-quick is a high priority.

Our Tiny Deck

The picture above is our house. Compared to our house, our deck is tiny. The deck snuggly holds a BBQ, a table and four chairs.  Our “fantasy” deck design will hopefully allow us to gain more useful deck space, and also allow us to use that deck during rainy months.

Replacing a Deck Should be Fairly Straight Forward?

Perhaps if you have done something like this before, you might say that replacing a deck should be easy.  Friends of ours are replacing a deck in their “getting away from it all" spot and the construction of that structure has been pretty relaxed and informal.  We on the other hand have a couple issues with our deck that has made it a little bit more complicated:

No Experience

The two of us have little experience in building a deck, or construction for that matter.  This mixed in with some additional complications has made me a little more focused on the project.  This is probably going to be an expensive rebuild, so I want to make sure we are covering our bases the best we can.

Making Sure We Take into Consideration Both of Our Needs

This is going to be a significant bit of construction.  Although we really are not going after something super fancy with built-ins or levels, my partner and I are very different people, and have different ideas about what we would potentially like.  Working on this deck together is also going to be a trial run for other large construction projects we are thinking of taking on.  We have been using a couple tools to brainstorm some ideas around the vision of a deck that have been helpful to communicate our perspectives to each other. 

Here are my favorite so far:

• Deck Magazines – I picked up a deck magazine in the supermarket.  This gave us some idea of utilities that we had not considered before because of the small size of our current deck, it also gave us some current estimate baselines for different size decks based on various design considerations like materials, size, and level of ornamentation of the deck.
• Google Sketchup – A friend of mine is an architect and he recommended looking at some of the decks in the sketchup library.  We were able to put a couple of the prebuilt decks up against a model of our house and quickly see visually what we didn’t really want. (Which is almost as important as knowing what you really want). 
• Third Party – It is great having a friend who designs structures for a living, but if I didn’t I would still probably get a third party to give things a peek and perhaps have us both talk about what we wanted in the deck.  Sometimes that communication tells where our ideas may not be matching up, or in some rare instances conflicting.
• Drawings – Where Google Sketchup allows us to get more of the orientation in to developing the deck, a plain and simple “napkin” drawing with written details and dimensions really allowed us to explore the basics.
• Design Patterns – One thing I really have enjoyed is using a Architectural Design Patterns book by Christopher Alexander.  It is called “A Pattern Language” (I mentioned another of his book in the post “The Oregon Experiment – More Evidence of the Brand of Geek I Am”.  It is with this book that my other half and I read through a number of known Architectural Patterns and have come up with a kind of vocabulary for what we would like and even some ideas on future projects.  Here are some of the patterns we looked into :
  

  106. Positive Outdoor Space
  133. Stairs as a Stage
  134. Zen View
  135. Tapestry of Light and Dark
  158. Open Stairs
  161. A Sunny Place
  163. Outdoor Room
  195. Staircase Volume
  212. Columns at Corners
  105. South Facing Outdoors
  167. Six-Foot Balcony
  244. Canvas Roofs
  193. Half Open Walls
  191. The Shape of Indoor Space

  A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series) ISBN: 0195019199 ISBN-13: 9780195019193

    

The patterns on stairs were particularly helpful in fixing some of the fallacies that we had in our thinking about stairs.  “A Pattern Language” is really a lovely tool for inspiration.

Working on a Surface that isn’t Flat

 Another issue that seems to make this project a bit more complicated is the added slope of the land that our house is built on. Above is our quick “napkin” drawing of the dimensions we are considering.

From the drawing is should be a little clearer in the “looking west” portion of the drawing that we have a little bit of slope to contend with while building.  This is the main reason we will be using a more formal method of developing this deck, namely using a contractor.  Since the dimension of the deck will be a wee bit more than three times the size of our current tiny deck, we are thinking we need to call in a few experts.  Communicating what we want to those experts will be the next part.

What the heck do we want anyway?

Well, now that we have kind of an idea of the size we want, and kind of the shape we want, and kind of where it will reside on the planet in relation to our house, we now need to start getting down to the details.  This is where Google Sketchup has been helpful. 

I am lucky that my friend is also a master with Google Sketchup.  We have slowly started to crave out some of the details in different drawings.  Here is one of the preliminary drafts where we considered having a full trellis above the deck.

And the virtual “up” view through the trellis:

And now I need to get back to looking at this.  There is definitely still some work to-do.  I really need to work out the column and trellis idea…  a trellis and awning together is just not going to do… details… details…