The Deck Overhaul, pt. 1

At our house in Eugene, we have a back deck. I'd say it's a good 20-25 sq ft, it's covered, and it's a fun place to hang out. However, over the course of this year, it has basically become a trash can. There were 2 futons out there with stuff piled on them, a few rolling chairs, and a lot of other crap we just didn't want in the house. It's essentially become unusable. Well, Bryan and I were talking about that, and we decided we were going to fix it, and we began today.

Welcome to The Deck Overhaul, pt. 1.

While we were talking about it, we came up with a few objectives:

1. We need to clear the crap. All the stuff we can throw out or take home, we're going to. Also, Bryan is going to pressure wash it over spring break to give the wood a face lift.
   
2. We want to make it usable. It's a large area relative to the space we have in the house, and we need to take advantage of that. The main use will be hanging out, so we need to make it comfortable and functional.
   
3. We want to build a table/bar out there. As we're all turning 21 soon, we'll need that.
4. We want it to be a place where we want to hang out. We want it to be a kick ass deck, and all other objectives must observe this one.
   

Now that we had a jumping off point, we got to it. Like I was saying, it was getting cluttered out there, and the biggest burden of space was the futons. We had 2, but didn't need 2, so today Bryan and I tore one up. Both of them still worked, but one had a wood frame and one had a metal frame, and since we wanted to make a table, we figured we could use the wood from one futon to build it. Here's the frame:
















The two main pieces can be used as a surface base, and the rest can be used for support like the legs. So we tore that up, and got everything we needed to build the table besides an actual surface, but for that we'll just go pick up a piece of plywood from Home Depot for $20. After that, we got a lot of the designing out of the way, a big fancy brainstorming session throwing ideas back and forth, and what we came up with is going to be cool I think.

So, to get your bearings, here's the layout of our deck now:
















I'm standing in the doorway to the house, that futon that Bryan's on is against the left wall, the wood from the futon is against the right wall, and I'm pretty close to even with the back wall. As you can see, not all that big, but we'll make it work, and here's how:

We plan to build the table on the right wall. Since we don't have much room, we're going to anchor it to the wall, and put hinges on the two surface base pieces so you can fold half of it down when you aren't using it. When we want to extend it, we'll simply use pieces of wood as supports from the leg of the table. I don't have the construction vocabulary to explain it properly, but that's alright, because I drew pictures:












Here it is anchored to the two beams we have on the deck wall, supported by 2 legs, and one half folded down on the hinges.












Here it is extended with the supports shown. I figure we attach the supports to the legs of the table with hinges as well, and put wood blocks on the end of the bottom of the leaf side surface to rest the supports on. That way, we don't have two other legs in the way, and nothing is on the table top to get in the way (the hinges of the leaf obviously being on the bottom). Then, when it's folded down, we just fold the supports back and have the leaf come down in front of them. Or, we could just put brackets on the leaf and the leg, and have the support be totally separate and then insert it into the two brackets when we want the leaf out. That isn't shown in the first picture, but hopefully you get my drift.

Anyways, that's the plan as of now. I'm excited to get to it, because I love this kind of stuff. I'm sure we'll hit it again next weekend, and I'll update you as we progress. See you next time on The Deck Overhaul.