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…

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