Where does the time go? It was a year ago when I told my loyal readers I would do a better job of keeping track of the action. Well, we got busy with various other things, most of which had nothing to do with building the house. As you will remember at the last post we had started to finish the deck. The “hard part” was done, that being the foundation and frame for the deck.
It all sounded good, till we started putting down the $30K of Ipe boards. Due to the way the deck was made (curves and angles) we did not have a regular joist spacing like you would with a square or rectangular deck. So if we screwed the boards down in the normal way we would have had rows of screws in no particular order or geometry. To fix this we decided to go with a concealed fastener system Deckwise Ipe Clips. These are small stainless steel plastic coated plates that fit into slots cut into the edge of the boards. You cut a slot, then put the clip in the slot, and screw it down. Then the next board covers the whole thing up. Easy Peasy!
What happened is quite different. Usually once we do something for a while we get exponentially faster and better at it. Not in this case.
First, the thing I’m really glad we didn’t do. It sounds like a good idea to have the slots for the clips pre cut. The Ipe Company will do this for you. In our case it was an extra $4k. Well, we decided to save that money and use my 20 year old biscuit cutter to do the job. I figured I would wear it out (never did, although I did go through one blade). I needed a new one anyway. As we were putting down the first few boards it became apparent that you really need the slot in exactly the correct place on the board (not too high, not too low). If you don’t it’s an almost impossible job. So thank God we didn’t pre groove the boards!
As you’ll recall we ended up with 4 big “pie” sections and about 10 smaller ones. Each one needs to be completed before working on the next one in order to have some hope of matching the edges up. For the first big pie section we spent a total of 8 days of 6 hours/day. And we never got faster than that. The smaller sections took about 5 days each.
Initially we tried to speed things up, but quickly figured out we were in for the long haul. The problem was that each board had to be pre slotted before fastening it down. Trying to cut the slots in place turned out to be dangerous and hard. Each of the boards needed 20-30 slots cut. The fastening operation also took time. Each screw hole had to be predrilled, the clip inserted, then screwed down. As the months (yes, really!!!) rolled on we realized that even at our fastest each board took 15 minutes from start to finish. On a good day we might get 15, if it was a slow day maybe 10. We resigned to our fate and decided to “grind it out” which is how the next 6 months went by. The great thing was that the cash expenditures went to zero because until this was done absolutely nothing else was going on.
It’s been a year since we put the last board on the big deck. Kind of like having a baby you tend to forget the pain. All in all the deck is beautiful so worth it (maybe?). I will say that I can’t imagine how much the installation would have cost if we had had to hire someone to do it. It’s a nice system but completely impractical if you have to pay someone else to do it.
So let’s say you want to ignore everything I just said because you really want it! There are two things you really have to have to do this job. First, the “hardwood wrench” that the ipe place sells. I don’t have a picture of it. It’s around $200. Don’t skimp, don’t substitute. Second is a clamp setup like this. This stuff is quite a bit stiffer than pine, to bend it you need some real force! In this photo there is a clip in a slot down by the clamp handle to give you an idea of what they look like.
With the deck boards down it was time to move on to the guard rails. We decided to go with the stainless steel cable rail system. For building code reasons the wires are 3 inches apart. They need to be tight enough so that at no place will a 4 inch ball fit through the cables (i.e. a baby’s head!). This would be difficult to do with with the spans of 9 or 10 feet that we had. You have to have a “spacer” upright in the middle of the span to make it work. Pricing the various pre made options for the “spacer” resulted in about $150 per spacer for a stainless steel model. Fortunately due to my boat building efforts I was able to invent a carbon fiber tube spacer for about $40 each. That is the black tube in the picture above. It’s made of 3/4 inch carbon tube. I had to drill the holes for the cable to pass through. In addition, each one was painted with “Industrial Imron” which is a version of the very expensive boat paint “Imron”. Industrial Imron is half the price of the consumer model although color choice is limited to four colors. The paint is only there to protect the carbon tube from UV light. We picked black, which you’ll see ended up being the right choice. One early worry was that since Carbon is the highest metal on the galvanic table that the stainless cables would be corroded by interacting with the Carbon. One year in and no evidence of corrosion, so we are very happy with it.
As for the handrails themselves when sourcing the lumber it was obvious that we just had to spend the money on the very nice moldings that the Ipe company was selling for $11 a running foot. We couldn’t skimp on the upper part of the handrail but the lower rail wasn’t as complicated as the top part so we opted to buy 2×6 ipe lumber and shape the lowers ourselves. This ended up being about half the cost of buying them premade.
When you stare down the saw at a $200 board you decide to get serious about jigs to make sure you don’t ruin a piece. We ended up making a jig out of a pool cleaning stick and a couple of angled boards on the end. We set the jig in the spot and then extended the pool cleaning stick till the angled boards on the ends rested on the deck posts. Once there we adjusted the boards till the angles matched. So we had both the perfect length and angled cuts on the ends of each handrail. Other than a few wider than desired gaps we didn’t mess up a single handrail.
The ways you can attach handrails is limited only by your imagination. The most important things for us were that the fastenings be concealed, and that the handrail be rock solid. We were able to do both. Each post has a 4 inch long by 1/2 inch Stainless Steel (316 grade) pin that the handrail rests on. In the picture above you see the lower part of the handrail in place. The pin fits in the groove. The entire piece is secured to the post by Kreg jig screw hidden on the bottom of the board. The board is trapped against the pin and the Kreg screw keeps the whole thing from rotating around the pin.
The upper handrail also has Kreg screws. This are to hold it to the post and to keep it from rotating around the pin.
At this point the upper handrail is glued and screwed to the lower handrail. One sad thing is that I had bought 10% more of the very expensive handrail moldings than necessary to account for waste. We had very little waste and so ended up with $500 worth of extra boards. At least we have stock on hand to repair any possible storm damage!
As we were looking around the lumber pile I figured out that we had “extra” 4/4 (1 inch thick) Ipe boards. This was the result of being very frugal with waste. The plan for our original stairs was to move them to the other side of the deck away from our “Main” entrance. That stair will lead to our “yard” next to bathroom of the house. So we needed a new set of stairs for the “Grand” entry. We had just enough Ipe lumber to build this set of stairs. The older stairs had just a little bit too much slope to them so for this one I added an extra step. This made it a lot more comfortable to use than the previous stairs.
As we finished the stairs Princess decided we needed to coat them with an Ipe Oil finish to make them beautiful. As you can see the stuff does work. We bought quite a bit of this stuff enough to do the entire 1700 sq ft deck. Unfortunately as pretty as this is when we returned 4 months later the Ipe had turned grey as it naturally does. Considering it took a lot of a day to do the initial coat we decided to let the whole thing go natural. It would be way too much work to keep up this finish!
As we finished this trip up a few statistics about the deck. In the end it took almost 2 years to build from the concrete footings to the handrails. The total cost was more than the house kit! And we still weren’t done, next time we’ll get to the “Sky Deck” and the anchoring of the work we did to the ground.
Our turtle friends have flourished in the meantime. We’ve been throwing various vegetable scraps off the deck which they have found tasty. At last count our “herd” was about 10 or so. They’ve also decided our place is a good place to have a good time. Every evening we got to witness attempts by them to increase the Turtle population. The funniest thing is during the act they make exactly the same noises that Goats do. So we have the Turtle noise on the Island and the Goat noise at our Texas ranch! One mystery is how the female turtle decides who to mate with. We hear a lot of ruckus in the bush while this is determined but no eyes on yet to see how male turtles fight. Unlike Goats they don’t kill each other so no way of telling until we finally see them do it in the open air.