Improving Outdoor Deck Traffic Flow
When we moved into our twenty-plus-year-old middle class home in Santa Cruz, we liked the deck that was framed by the U shaped single story ranch style house. However, we knew that some renovations on the deck were in order. While the deck seemed to be in pretty good shape, it was painted with brown exterior paint or had been covered with some combination of dark brown exterior wood stain and paint over the years.
While the deck was pretty low to the ground, our housing inspector was able to crawl part-way under our house when he did the initial inspection for us when we were buying this house. His conclusion that the cement block footings were firmly placed on the ground and that the installer seemed to have even taken the precaution of laying some gravel under and near the cement footing so stabilize the ground when it got wet. Since our roughly quarter acre lot was irrigated by sprinklers, obviously the deck did not get wet because of lawn watering most of the year when it did not rain. However, it can rain of days on end sometimes in Santa Cruz in the winter, which could cause mud and shifting of the deck. Therefore, this gravel was a good precaution instead of just plopping the cement piers on the bare ground.
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The original builder had used the typical cement piers that you can buy in a home improvement store. They look like little pyramids with their tops sliced off and an indentation for the bottom on of the posts. You can buy some of these cement decking piers now with galvanized metal fastening strips molded into the cement pier when the cement was poured into the mold to make the deck pier. However, for our deck this had not been done, probably because the deck was so low to the ground.
Furthermore, the whole deck was framed in on three sides by the foundation of the house and there were redwood 2 x 4s bolted to the sides of the foundation on the inside of the U of the house. From what we – the home inspector and I – could tell, the original deck builder had probably added the deck for the new owner of the house when it was built. Typically, new single family homes are sold with the landscaping done in the front yard to aid in the selling process, but the back yard was empty, so that the new owners could decide how they wanted to design their own backyard. Plus, obviously, this cut costs and lowered the overall initial purchase price of the house when it was sold new.
A few of my older neighbors are original home owners and told me that this is how the homes were sold when our subdivision was developed. It is also clear, given the variety of designs in the back yards of the neighborhood. While the homes are semi-custom ranch style homes, and not just cookie cutter homes from a few different models, there is a far greater variety in back yard designs that the moderate amount of variety you see in the homes themselves, when you drive down the streets of our housing development.
In the backyards of some homes in our neighborhood is a cement or wooden step outside and down from the sliding glass doors for the family rooms. Usually, when there is a step, the U shaped part of the back yard the surrounded on three sides by the homes will have a cement patio, a flagstone patio, a brick patio, a paving stone patio, or simply an extension to the grass yard. Most houses in the neighborhood have a patio, but a few are like ours and have a deck instead.
For all the backyard decks that I have seen in the neighborhood, they all try to be level with the interior floors of the house so that you can just step out on them. Our house is one of these. We have a family room or sun room, as we call it, because it gets full southern exposure, and we have decorated our sunroom with a tropical theme. We have furnished our sun room with some good quality indoor outdoor rattan furniture and white wicker furniture. We also bought a bit of extra matching rattan furniture to use outside on our deck. When the rains come, we haul it into this sunroom / family room for temporary storage. All this nice garden furniture goes out again, when the sun and warm weather returns. One nice thing about rattan and wicker furniture is that it is very solid and durable, yet it still is not terribly heavy.
On the other side of the deck off the back of a large central bathroom is a regular door that swings inward allowing access to the backyard and deck from there. That means we have a level deck that completely covers the exterior of the partially enclosed U part of the back yard. The deck even extends about four feet into the back yard beyond the U part of the house.
Now, I have told you that the foundation was in good shape and that the boards covering the entire deck were in good shape. However, they had an ugly brown paint on them, when we bought the house and it was peeling up in a few places. Obviously, it at least needed some tender loving care and a new coat of paint, stain, or deck waterproofing.
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