We added a deck safety gate to our front veranda to help keep the kids from falling down the stairs. The gate can also be locked for added security if desired.

I was lucky in that I had some railing left over from the old landing that was torn down when they lifted our house. I was able to cut that down to the width of the opening from our veranda to the new landing. On either side of the cut down railing I added a 2×4 and then added a diagonal support to help it maintain shape, since it would only be attached on one side.

For the gate latch I used a pool gate lock, which was easy to install, and makes it hard for the kids to reach the latch top open the gate until they are older and taller.

The gate is a bit of pain to open if I don’t have a free hand to pull the latch, but I figure that the added safety outweighs that little bit of inconvenience.

It was a sad day a few weekends ago when we finally sold our deck.

It took us almost two-weeks to sell the deck after we first advertised the deck for sale in the Townsville Bulletin. We had a lot of people call and say they were going to come, and not show up. We had one couple call, measure it all up, and then go home to check and never call back.

After the two weeks it took us to sell the deck, it then took almost two more weeks for the deck to finally be picked up. The heavy rains we had in Townsville managed to put a damper on that…

In the end we sold it to a fellow Canadian who is working in the building industry in Townsville. We got about a third of our asking price for the deck, which was disappointing to say the least. I don’t know if we got ripped off or not though, as I have yet to see another used deck advertised here in Townsville, and I didn’t have anyone around to ask for advise on the purchase price.

Our builder didn’t comment much on the price that we got for the deck. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing.

All I can say is that I will miss the idea of having a nice large deck off the back of our Queenslander. The money that we should save on putting it up the deck and building the roof will be put to good use as we continue to get the house finished off on the ground floor.

We have had two extremely heavy days of rain  the last month or so. They have highlighted to us our leaking front veranda and leaking upstairs windows. The first day was the heaviest recorded in over a decade, and the second day was 18cm, or 7 inches of rain.

As you can see, not everyone thought that the rain was a bad thing… Ah, to be young and care free again.

We had some trouble with our front veranda leaking and also with the old upstairs window frames leaking through the wall, down the studs and into the ground floor.

The problem was not in the waterproofing of our front veranda that our builder here in Townsville did, but rather with the old wall soaking up the water and it running down through that.

The other problem was that the original veranda had a negative slope on the veranda. The negative slope caused the water to pool next to the wall, instead of running off the front of the veranda. This gave the water the chance to soak into the wall and then run down to under the house.

Between the first and the second rain the guys who lifted our house came back and tried to give the veranda a positive slope by packing up the back of the veranda by about 15mm. Although they made a big difference in their adjustment, the water still pooled a bit next to the wall and ran under the house. You can see the pooling of the water on the veranda in the photo on the right.

The upstairs windows should be able to be fixed by adding some colorbond flashing over the existing window sills. When we had our new upstairs windows put in some of the sills were flashed, but not all of them. I’m going to have to fix the rest of them, replace our kitchen window completely and also seal the air-conditioner installation into the master bedroom as it’s a pretty large hole.

I’ll continue to update you on the progress as we look at how to fix the pooling water on our front veranda as well as the leaking upstairs windows.

We finally came to the tough decision to sell the deck instead of putting the deck up on the back of our house.

I was really looking forward to the elevated deck off the back of our Queenslander, but we will still be able to use the pavers from our old house to put a patio out the back of our house.

Ironically I just heard back from the Townsville Council about my new deck design this week. The next step in that process would have been to contract an engineer to do an engineering certificate for the deck using the steel frame instead of the timber frame.

This actually had no bearing on us selling the deck as we had come to that decision before hearing from council.

Technorati Tags: townsville, deck, patio

At the moment I am having to redesign the plan for our deck at the back of our house.

When our first dodgy builders got our deck plans drawn up by an architect they neglected to tell the architect that we already had our old decking materials from our old house. Because the architect didn’t know this fairly major bit of information he didn’t take an of our existing materials into account when he drew up the plans for our new deck design.

When I first noticed the different I didn’t think too much about this because I figured we could make it work. The problem though is that the old deck was built using steel for most of the structural stuff and the new deck was designed all in timber.

I have talked with our architect and the original deck builder about the problem and unfortunately neither one has been able to offer me a definitive answer to my problem. The architect recommended that I build the deck as close to his plans as we can, using the materials that we have. The original deck builder showed me a few things about how they do their decks with the type of deck roof that we need, but then told us that they didn’t want to be involved in a project using old materials.

Either way we are looking at probably needing to submit an amendment to our our plans for the deck design to the Townsville City Council. The plans for the current deck design is almost all timber, with timber bearers, timber joists, timber decking and steel posts and stumps. The deck that we will be building will have mostly steel construction with steel bearers, steel joists, steel stumps and posts and timber decking.

One of the sticking points for me right now is how to do the landing on the top of the stairs. I’m not really sure how to mount them, or what sort of affect it will have on the footings and posts that have to put in. On our original deck the landing was attached to the side of the house, off the side of the deck. On the new deck though it will be off the back of the deck, not attached to the house.

I am hoping to talk to the guys that built our original deck sometime this week about it. They gave my a copy of the plans for our old deck design, so hopefully I will be able to see some plans with the sort of design we are going for.

We will just have to wait, hope and see right now I guess…

Technorati Tags: deck, steel deck, timber deck, wood deck, deck design, deck plans