Recycled wooden deck

A while back I offered to build a deck for my girlfriends mother, she has a beautiful home right on the Kleinemonde east river just outside of the small coastal town of Port Alfred, Eastern Cape, South Africa. The idea was that I would try and buy as little of the material as possible and see if it was possible to build a nice wooden deck for next to nothing using whatever materials I could get my grubby little paws on. Bearing in mind that this was the first time I had ever attempted building something bigger than a dining room table.

I gave my sister-in-laws brother a call, he's a local builder in town and the last time I was at his place I spied a whole heap of used building timber in his yard. He was more than happy to let me help myself to whatever I needed.

Holy Crap Sticks!!!.... I was like a junkie that had just been given the keys to the Meth Lab. I gotta tell ya I was a little bit woozy, so much wood, so little space on the back of my Corsa bakkie. Needless to say I drove outta there with my poor little bakkie creaking under the weight.

Okay, so the first thing I had to do was measure out where I was going to insert the wooden support columns. I measured out the length and width of the deck and hammered in some bamboo stakes where I wanted the supports to go and marked out the lines with some twine wrapped around the stakes. To be honest I didn't actually check that the corners were 100% square, I knew something about Pythagoras's theorem....the square of the hypotenuse ..blah blah...I was like..stuff it...looks pretty square to me :-)

Maggie pondering Pythagoras' Theorem

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So once I had all the pegs marked out for the support poles it was time to get to work. I dug the holes about 400mm deep, set the poles and then filled them up with concrete. I've read that some people cover the bottom half of the pole that goes into the ground with plastic before filling it up to prevent the pole from rotting. Speaking to the local farmers they reckon that the poles tend to rot at ground level so it should be sufficient to just fill the hole up with concrete a couple of millimeters above ground level. I left the poles to set for a week and then started putting the frame together. I used 10mm threaded rod cut to the correct length with nuts and washers on each end to fasten the beams to the poles.

So now with my frame in place it started looking like an actual deck, I was pretty stoked with myself at this point, no severed limbs and it looked pretty straight and level from most angles. Most of the wooden planks I had scavenged for the deck were different lengths so I sorted them out into piles of similar lengths and cut the odd ones out to size, I really just mixed and matched, I wasn't too worried about the width of each plank so long as they were all the same thickness. I started at the end furthest from the house and worked my way backwards making sure that I used all the crappy planks first, that way they wouldn't be the first thing you noticed if you walked onto the deck from the porch.

That's Bailey getting some good lovin' from Caroline

All the wood I used was treated pine that is mainly used as rafters in the building industry in South Africa, except for the rails, for that I cut down some pine branches from the big pine tree in the back yard, peeled the bark off and let them dry in the sun for about a week or two. I cut them to size and nailed them to railing and the deck evenly spaced apart, it definitely gives it a more rustic feel and once I gave the entire deck a coat of wood stain it came out pretty awesome.

All in all it probably took me about 3 weekends to build this deck and about a R1000 in materials, the main cost being the wood stain which was almost R500 for 5liters. I reckon for someone to build you a deck of this size would cost anything from R8 000 to R10 000 if not more. I was really chuffed with the results especially seen as it was my first time doing this sort of thing. The main tools I used were a Circular Saw, Jig Saw, Drill, T-Square, Level, Tape Measure, Pencil and my favorite multi-tool.......the Hammer ;-)

I think anyone with a bit of creativity and the ability to operate a power tool could do this....so what you waiting for...??