Building a free-standing deck on a slope

we had a break in the weather for a little bit right now the ground should usually have like a foot of frost on it but we had a lot of warm weather and yesterday for actually for the last couple days it's been above freezing so there's no frost on the ground so I'm going to do this job you can see they got a nice view of the river here so what we're doing is putting a new deck on they had an existing deck so the new deck is gonna be 11 by 22 and it's gonna go right here so I almost wasn't gonna bring a machine over because this is just really hard to get into because of this hill here from here to the river it's probably a 100-foot drop on a hundred feet so this is where the existing deck was so here's some pictures of it you can see that this deck wasn't built properly there isn't even any spindles it's pretty dangerous it wouldn't normally be so dangerous but in this spot you're way up high and if you fall it's gonna be a really bad thing so you can see the frame was not built right at all there's nothing about this that's safe or was built right the posts weren't in concrete they didn't have a footing they didn't have anything they were just resting in the ground the whole thing was dilapidated it was just ready to fall down and this is a pretty dangerous area for something to fall down because you just keep rolling down the hill if you did the only way I'm gonna make this work with my excavator is I brought some plywood and some wood so I don't tear up the grass and I'm gonna have to stay up top to dig the upper footings and then I'll have to get down here somehow to do the lower footings it's gonna be a little bit tricky that's why I wanted to do it by hand but right now it's just too cold to mess around with that I just want to get these footings as in as soon as possible once they're in it's kind of like the pressures off but until then I just I need to get them in so the customer doesn't mind if I have to tear some of this rock wall down and I will because there has to be a footing right there so I'm gonna use big foot footings 24 inch wide and they're gonna be four feet down so that the frost can't hear them you don't have to do it like that but whenever you're doing a deck that's somewhat questionable about its location and the danger of it it's better just to make it right you [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] this is like the perfect jet skiing weather - the cold but actually it's the middle of January and it's probably 40 degrees right now birds are chirping everywhere is that river is smooth as glass right now not a ripple on it beautiful Waterfall sounds pretty good so these sauna tubes on the top there were only eight inches and the reason is because I want to just rest the girders right on them so the girder beam carrying the joists is just gonna be doubled up so I'll put a four by four post bracket on there and then on the bottom I'm gonna do 10-inch sonotubes because I'm gonna have six by six that's coming up a lot of people argue you need like a 12 or 16 inch sauna tube for the six by sixes but it's just not necessary that's really only necessary if you're not using a footing on the sauna tube if you're if you're using a footing you really just need minimum just for the six by six to rest on it like without sticking off the sides that's all you really need I have a trick that you can use sometimes to square things up [Music] this thing produces a square line it has one line that goes this way one line that goes this way so what you can do is when this front row is lined up perfectly which you just need a string for then you run this laser down right into the center of both of those other sonotubes and then once this laser is right in the middle here in the middle there the line going this way is perfectly square so then you can go down here see it just shining right on the camera so then you take this 6-foot level you line it up at the laser and make sure the bubbles in center which see so the laser is on the bubbles in the middle so now you know the bottom and this is exactly where it needs to be now this line I'm getting right now is just for a rough reference because I'm just I need to dig still once the sonotubes in there then you can set this right on top of the sonotube you can put a little piece of wood on top of this on a tube and you can see exactly where it needs to go so that's a quick easy way to do this without using battery boards [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so since they have this nice-looking Stonewall here I don't do that type of work I don't really do landscaping but let me just see if I can try to make this look reasonable [Music] you you you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] you [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] this freshman has applied to so when when those finds collect water just freeze up and it makes [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] I don't really need enough of this stuff to warm bringing a dump truck over just need like a scooper to put it back in my truck and that's a triumph like that [Music] you I thought a big group of jets was going by but I guess it's just this guy breaking the ice it's actually going pretty fast for a tugboat you you so that's kind of where we're at right now I'm just trying to work with what I got here in the middle I put that little lighter one over on that other side there's just too much of a drop to really put anything I kind of wanted to put another big stone there but it's gonna take a lot of fill to do that and I ran out of gravel or ran out of sand I don't really do landscaping like I said so this is just an attempt to make it look somewhat better but really this whole area down here is all gonna need some topsoil I'd rather not bring the gravel out because then it will kind of interfere with the lawn and then you'll have like rocks going into the lawnmower and stuff so I'm just gonna tell them to get a load of topsoil in here when it gets warmer right now you can't get topsoil it's way too frozen cuz it's it retains moisture so much so it just freezes at the gravel yard even this crusher run was pretty frozen so for the framing here I got some cross bracing some X's here and got another cross number there and then up here I also have these diagonals and then we also put some blocking in some bridging as you would call it mid span between the two so I put those little wings down there they're like a gusset plate because there's nothing stabilizing that soaking kind of teeter-totter you can see the girders are resting right on the sonotubes with a one-inch standoff see so it's just about dark just getting things finished up here just trying to reorganize this wall here I've got these hurricane straps in here hurricane ties if you want to call it that and believe it or not that's because you you need a way to prevent uplift I know it's hard to believe a deck would have uplift but it does the code requires you to put those hurricane ties in there normally if you're attached to a house you can get away with just tow nailing in from the joist to the beam but when it's a free-standing deck by code you're not allowed to do that you have to use positive connection which would be like a metal plate there's different kinds of things you can use but these are just quick and easy so you also have to keep in mind with these decks that you have to have its strong enough to withstand the snow load in the area so the ground snow load in this area is about 50 pounds per square foot so it has to be designed to a minimum of that and there's 10 pounds of dead load in there to that you have to consider which is the weight of the lumber itself can't believe they're still geese around here I think they were kind of confused this year they don't know which way to go about a week ago I saw them all flying north I thought that was kind of strange for the middle of the winter

Channel: Jesse Muller

Views: 315,009

Rating: 4.8363934 out of 5

Keywords: deck, freestanding deck, sono tubes, sono-tubes, bigfoot footings, pressure treated lumber, hudson river, ny, andrew camarata, excavator, 35 zts, john deere, international 4700, 7and5, good music

Id: YHjCA8NDmD8

Length: 37min 58sec (2278 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 25 2020