All Hands on Deck

.....get it? All hands on deck? I'm getting my deck redone! lol. I'm so clever. ;)

But seriously, our deck is in a terrible state. When we bought our house, 4 years ago, we loved the fact that it had a deck although we seldom use it (apparently the hubby doesn't like to eat outside, wish I had known that before). But over the last 4 years the wood has really fallen apart. We're thinking it wasn't treated right, so we decided that this is the year to work on the outside....first project being our deck!

Here are some before pictures of the deck, nothing grand but it's nice for the size of our backyard...

The entire back deck

Little bench that was built (ignore terrible landscaping, another project)!

Doesn't look too bad here....

Believe it or not this board was actually screwed in & still came up!

You're probably thinking 'this could be cleaned up'!

The wood is ALWAYS wet over here, thinking there might be a problem... :(

Yup, there's the problem. The boards are super soft.

We knew we had to get this fixed but Ryan and I are not handy people like this. I really wish I was and I'm always up for learning if I have the right people showing me how, but this project was something for an "expert". Time to call in a favor! :)

My best friend's husband, Matt, is somewhat of an expert in my opinion. He's super handy and knows how to do all sorts of stuff (plus he's super nice). He so graciously accepted the offer of helping us out on his days off. Here's Matt:

Isn't he a cutie!

And here's the work he's been able to do thus far with replacing the boards on our deck:

All this wood was needed!

Had to use a Lowe's truck to get it home!

It looks so pretty! And SO much better than the other wood.

Another angle

The destruction....

As we thought, there is actually a problem with that portion of our deck. Apparently where the wood is always wet is because the soil is too high and keeps water from rain & run-off against the wood. EEK! The entire frame has to be rebuilt, but alas Matt has a full time job so it needs to wait a week. Stay tuned for the next part of our deck makeover!!