Finished my deck

[DaveC426913]

TL;DR

Took me all summer and $6Gs+ but I finished all 1600 square feet of it.

This project is rated at 10/10 (determined by how many fingers I have at the end).

(Oops. I see these pics were taken just a few days before completion. Poolside trim is incomplete I see.)

Did all the fence work too (2y ago, before pool went in) to make it safe, private and bylaw-compliant.

 

[berkeman]

Very nice work, Dave. I see a lot of fine touches in your work there.

 

[stefun2takes]

The unfinished made me laugh. Looking at the cut and considering what you already went through i can understand putting off a minute

 

[Point Conception]

Yes alot of work. If I installed a pool like that it would would be a rectangle. Then all the deck planks would be squared up right angles. That irregular pool shape just makes for a more than necessary difficult challenge. And also a rectangle is more Feng shui compatible in that setting.

 

[DaveC426913]

Yes alot of work. If I installed a pool like that it would would be a rectangle. Then all the deck planks would be squared up right angles. That irregular pool shape just makes for a more than necessary difficult challenge. And also a rectangle is more Feng shui compatible in that setting.

The pool is a fixed octagon. Not my choice.

The pool is installed about 3 degrees off from the fence.

But the biggest inconvenience: the ground around the pool slopes by as much as a foot. It's too much to level, and I can't simply make the entire deck one height. So I had to step it. You can see a low ramp in the foreground and a step on the right.

But what will drive your OCD wonky is that the side deck is aligned with the fence, whereas the rest of the deck is aligned with the pool. You can't see it but that side deck has all its boards off by a few degrees!

(This is because I built the deck in phases, over more than one summer. The wonky part was an early phase, before it was apparent how the rest of the deck would be laid out. In retrospect, this didn't save me any effort.)