Deck Building Tips

by Casey FitzGerald

We’re in full deck building mode this weekend building a floating deck in a previously unused corner of our yard. We loved building our first deck and definitely learnt a lot. Are you thinking of building a deck but have no idea where to start? I feel ya. Here are some tips I hope will help make the whole deck building process more fun and less stressful!

deck building tips, decks, diy, home maintenance repairs, how to

Research, Research, Research

After talking my husband Chris into building the deck ourselves we did a lot of research. I like books & blogs and Chris likes YouTube so we really covered all our bases. I recommend becoming familiar with all aspects of deck building like parts & materials before you even think about the design (it’s totally worth the wait).

Get Out The Garden Hose

Looking through a gazillion inspiration photos on Pinterest and drawing pictures of the shape and size of your deck on the back of an envelope can be really helpful – but our favourite planning tool is our garden hose! Lay out your hose (or scrap wood, whatever!) and mark the outline of your deck IN PLACE. It’s much easier to see what will work and what won’t IRL. Make any adjustments you need and when you’re happy write down all the measurements.

Look At Your Grading

When we were planning our deck we didn’t really pay attention to grading and we should have. It wasn’t until we were cutting down our posts that we realized that our deck was going to be too high for our backdoor because of how sloped our yard is. Knowing this early on will help you make design decisions that will work best in your yard.

Be Prepared To Adapt

With any DIY there’s going to be stuff that doesn’t go as planned. Be ready to adapt and don’t stress about it. Our grading issue? We decided to create a two-level deck by using joist hangers in front of our sliding door, and then stepped up by installing the joists on top of our beams over in the high area of the yard. It totally looks like it was intentional and it worked so well because we were willing to adapt and get creative.