How I Built a $35K Deck for $6K | DIY

hey guys Jeff here today I'm at my daughter's house we're in the backyard here's the deal I got a phone call from them a couple weeks ago and they said hey we got a quote to get this fence 20 feet of fencing and a gate installed it's gonna be 5600 bucks I said you guys are crazy I'm in town I've got some time let me put a material order together and I'm gonna go build you a deck with a privacy screen for the same money well here it is we got all our material okay I was a little over budget because we went with cedar six thousand dollars okay the whole deck is sitting right here in the backyard today's video we are going to assemble the sucker and show you the power of DIY Because by the time I'm done we're going to have a thirty five thousand dollar finish value Oasis okay we're only going to spend a few thousand bucks on it save your money do it yourself earn value on your home okay don't let people overcharge you in today's Marketplace you got to do this yourself the deck we're building here is on about 400 square feet okay so just realistic expectation in one day you should be able to set up all of your box frame and all of your Florida joist package okay which is important because when you're all finished you're going to want to take all of your finished deck boards and store them on top of that because well if you live in the North you know what happens it gets sun and rain the next day and so on and so forth the weather's always changing having the grid the whole floor package built gives you a place to store your wood on a flat level surface so you can strap it all together and maintain your board so they're not going to get Warped in time rule number one when you're putting in a deck is got to get rid of the Organics we're talking about grass and all that black Earth the reason that's so crucial is because in a Four Season climate like we're we're in that stuff is going to rot and going to break down and so whatever your deck level is it's going to be very varying according to how much Organics are there and the degree of decomposition if you remove them then you have some stability here just to create a flat surface in the bottom of the hole so we can set the block this enables the block to go in somewhat level with really good contact with the ground there's two ways you can set your blocks you can set it on the ground after you remove the the grass or you can dig it into the hole so you can get the deck closer to the ground remember when you're doing a floating deck we've got code requirements we can only go 24 inches off the ground at any point on the deck so what we're doing on this side which is the high side of the ground we're putting the block right in the Earth okay that way when we get to the other side it's raised up and we're not going to exceed our height requirement here we go okay and this next step it's just some small half inch gravel it's clean Stone the idea here is when you dig a hole sometimes it would especially when you're getting started you can find rocks and have to move your hole and make it bigger or whatever have some gravel to backfill once you put your landscape cloth on you won't see the holes it's kind of dangerous walking around so just use this just to create a nice safe place to be working there's no drainage benefit or anything like that here this is just making sure that when you're working you're not going to throw your ankle that's all there is to it Next Step grab yourself some landscape cloth do a nice overlap like eight inches cover up the area where we're working with these great little pins once you've got your ground oil covered up we can start building our box beams now when it comes to spacing it's really kind of simple what we're going to work with is wanting to make everything Square so for instance these beams over here these are the first two we set them up so that they're eight feet apart the goal here is to have the second set of the structure resting on this which translates all the load into the post into the block on the ground right so we're going to have a ridge we're going to nail it all together and want all these joists to have resting on the box beam okay nice and simple so really when you're doing this you're setting up your layout start from the middle okay find something measure off from the house the same distance this type of system is incredibly merciful because you don't have to put the block at the very end you've all seen the decks where the deck blocks are exposed and they're cutting the skirt around the concrete block always looks like garbage if you do it this way you can recess this because you can can a lever using two by tens almost two feet after the block okay it gives you a lot more flexibility it lets you work inside the confines of the perimeter so that you can make adjustments and you aren't going to have ugly things to do with later so as long as your floor joists are on top of the two by tens we're going to be fine that's how you do your layout I'll show you this they're a little unstable right out of the gate right so the first thing we're going to do is I'm going to show you a trick to stabilize all the beams all right and then we can get the right measurements to continue building and that is to take one of these two by Eights and run it across the entire deck we're going to roll it over and screw it to the face and that will set up our depth that way everything is square Let's Get Down Dirty here this doesn't have to be perfectly level it's just to set up like an end stop for the deck now we know where the deck ends right here so we're going to cut a couple of blocks we're going to set those in attach the beam butt up against this board so now we know we can keep Square brilliant little system and you can make adjustments as you go along right now I need to cut myself some wood now next step with the 4x4 blocks when you cut anything structural like this it's going to go below grade especially but generally any major structural component you can see here this is the pressure treating that penetrated the wood okay didn't penetrate very good on the other sides so when you cut it although the surface is nicely treated now the uncut is completely exposed cut and seal is like a sealant it's a surface penetrating sealer for the wood to provide protection take the cut and seal then down inside the block that's unstable but it's still going to transfer load fantastic now we're going to add the two pieces to the side here we go now just to keep everybody straight with the lumber this is a two by ten two by ten is used in construction in homes and can span distances up to 16 feet okay it's a 16 foot logging board so when we put the posts inside a foot or so you actually have more structure than you have in your house so there's no question whether or not this can carry the load all right the only question is can you put it up in position and get it level all by yourself that's a trick this is my 2x8 that's attached to my other two boxes it's going to be what we're going to call our preliminary level okay and because we're dealing with wood you never really know so make sure that your crown is up and that basically makes sure the board if it has a warp to it that is Warped like a rainbow it'll perform better for you over time foot screw set your depth which is up against this I'm going to lift this up and what I'm calling this is temporary level because we're just trying to get it close all right no because my screw is so far from the board I wanted this end up just a little bit higher okay now that's my temporary level now I'm going to go to the other side I'm going to use an actual level on a 2x8 to get my right height set my screw in advance this is my Straight board that I'm going to put my level on you don't have to have a 12 foot level when you're working with my one hand I'm going to raise the two by ten until the level is in the right spot okay that is where the money is and I'm throwing another one just to make sure it's not slipping around you'll see how far the end dropped so now we're going to do is we're going to adjust this end so now we're going to lift this up flush and square second one for the measure okay again we're just setting that up trying to get the depth and get it close to the height so the other side will end up working we'll come back here this part is a little monotonous but if you follow this procedure works like a charm up to the board okay very important when you're working you can't let the box beam roll on you because right now I'm making contact I want to straighten it up I'm a good chunk of the way out here so to keep that from moving I'm gonna throw a screw into this post and we'll want to roll around so much there we go okay and now we can come down here and adjust this one again we want to make sure we're Square okay box babe now we're not done yet obviously that's no way that's strong enough what we're doing is we're just throwing in some temporary screws to carry the weight of the board itself now we're going to come by we're going to trim off all the tops seal it all up and I'm going to show you my load carrying steel bolt system that'll transfer 5000 pounds per post so you can build whatever you want on here here we go just swapped out an eight inch blade for the wood and what I'm going to do is I'm going to set the blade flat on the tops and put the plate of the reciprocator up against the board and push that should keep the machine still if the blade do all the work we should be able to cut this nice and flush here [Applause] very important to make sure it's at least flush don't leave it raised at all it will interrupt with the installation of the joist package and it's okay like this perfect whenever you're cutting structural wood make sure you seal up the end of every cut before you install your posts okay pressure treated doesn't go all the way through the board it just soaks into the wood on the outside all right and then same thing once you've cut down your posts you've got to seal anything structural okay be liberal with this let it soak right up it's okay if that stays wet for a few minutes all right because this is going to protect the structure long term and that'll protect your investment we're going to just rein this on okay to seal it up all right well that's awesome so now we have three boxes which is two one two stages for the deck [Music] it's a little bit of work with this bit the key is to constantly clean it out so that it doesn't overheat all right now we put the bolt in it won't just push through okay the hole is drilled perfect to the size of these threads so we actually have to hammer it in now this isn't installed until it's flushed with the wood all right now it's installed when it takes that much energy to put a bolt Through the Wood you know it's going to carry the load you'll notice I'm also about four or five inches down from the top and the truth of it is nothing splits when you start far enough away from the top and you seal the wood okay this is the best load transfer system on the market and we want to drive this nut until the washer it's flush with the wood okay now it's embedded that's not going anywhere five thousand pounds per post this deck can carry forty thousand pounds nobody has that many friends oh so our design has the deck coming through roughly the middle of the staircase so we're going to remove the steps luckily for us builders make them really simple they make a platform and they make stairs and they just tie it together with a few screws foreign okay now this is just like framing a wall we're going to put the ends together we're going to measure our 69 centers when you're working with five quarter deck boards it's actually one inch solid deck you need a 16 inch spacing if you're doing a deck like this and finishing with composite make sure you check with the manufacturer in a lot of cases composite requires 12 inch on Center because in the heat tends to get a little soft and doesn't have the same structural Integrity as wood does in the heat okay so you mark the 16s and you throw an x to the right my tape is little red squares thanks a lot of simple so you take your mark joist walk it over put it right in the middle mat a little bit easier set it on your post same thing over here remember these boards are the same length as the ones underneath okay so the box beam and your Rim joists are the same Dimension so you just line all these up nice and simple all right and now we're going to fill in the Middle with all of our two by eights that we need now remember we use two by ten on the bottom and up here we're using two by eight because our beams are only eight feet apart okay two by eight can span eight feet if you want to go to two by six you have to build your beams every five feet okay or you're gonna have so much deflection it'll feel like a trampoline now just for Simplicity my first Fastener I'm going to use a screw all four corners system I have a cage it's not going to fall all over the place and make a mess that way I can finish up with my compressor my air nailer we're just going to pound all these in two by eight requires four Fasteners on each side don't forget that 'll keep it strong and from rolling over what I want to do is I want to maneuver everything so that my two or eight my rims are flush with the ends okay and that every joist will be touching a piece of the two by ten all right now we're just uh fill in all the holes one of the reasons I show people how to make the box beam is you can see the mercy that's involved this entire structure can be slid all the way over here and as long as each of these joists is a half an inch on top of this two by ten the load transfer continues all the way through to the post into the ground so now you can actually measure off the building put on your triangle and square off your whole deck on top of the box beams and then once you've got that where you want it we can go to the next step I'm sure a lot of you have seen this if you haven't we're basically taking measurements three four and five um I got hurricane ties and I love these because if you can kind of get in here under the floor joists action I'm right here for instance I can attach it to the two by ten end of the floor joists right and it's not so that it doesn't lift up and blow away with Dorothy and her little dog okay so that we can establish our square and maintain it while we do the rest of the build you don't want to trust on a couple of deck screws because they break rather easily so throw a few of these in and whenever you're using structure use structural screws why not the end of the day if you don't want something to move because it's going to wreck your life if it happens you don't trust a deck screw deck screws are great when you're dealing with gravity keep things from flying around but we're not dealing with gravity here we're dealing with sheer forces somebody is working they bump into the deck he could knock the structure out of square on us so we want to make sure we maintain that and this is the way to do it and for everybody who hasn't seen this before this little box comes with its own bit you buy it right next to the structural nails for floor joists on the Shelf at the Home Depot it's not rocket science it's a hex head so it sits right in there no Hammer necessary this structure put a couple in the bottom couple in the top generally speaking you put one of these screws in every hole when it's designed for structural load and for actual hurricane situations but for us it's just keep things Square so two is fine we'll put one in all four corners and then we're ready to move on now the requirement here for adding to the next stage is really simple we use the same Rim we don't need another one all we do is offset or joist we can nail from the other side okay nice and simple we're going to be installing our Cedar with a hidden Fastener system from uh we're going to be installing a hidden Fastener system from camo so the location of the joist doesn't really matter we don't have to build everything so that like you do with surface screws surface screws all these joists have to line up it's got all got to be perfect because you're going to see that row of screws and part of what makes a good deck installation with surface screws is having all your screws in a row but we don't have to so we can cheat we can actually save ourselves a rim joist and offset the installation like this all we got to do is figure out how far we want to build Our Deck now because we are are measured Off the Wall Square and our box is now Square I only need to take one measurement cut every one of these boards exactly the same length and we are good as gold I got the edge of the houses here and I don't want to go there I want just to finish up on the inside of my gasoline okay so here's our property line and I'm going to come out at least 16 inches off the property line okay so that my rim my rim is right here nice nice and convenient my deck is only going to come up to about this far anyway but it's nice and convenient and it's lined up so 16 from here we're just going to put our tape measure on the wall rough to mate to my foot measure back to the foot seven feet well that's a nice round number we'll go seven feet all right four by four posts the same height as the table of the saw all right so when you're working mobile instant cutting table now we're not taking anything for granted here I'm going to measure each board at seven feet just because it does seem matte like the lumber is a little inconsistent what's up we're going to bring this down there we go oh lovely and of course I'm working with a 10 inch saw today [Music] and we got our boards cut here's the rim for the other side we're going to mark this now based off this Rim okay and I'm just gonna put on every board opposite this board so I have a nice nailing surface bugger everything [Music] before we put on our Rim joists we're going to take the unseal we're going to finish all these whenever you have cut wood it's always the first thing that goes right and this is going to be a part of the deck that no one's going to see no one's going to maintain but right here is where we're going to be attaching our privacy screen and so we don't want that screen to become the weakest link as far as the structure is concerned over time so take the extra minute you had to buy a whole can you might as well use it click it only takes a couple of seconds to get this done there's a little bit more framing we want to do here because this deck my 16 foot boards in this 16 foot deck I've got zero Mercy for the install if the boards are the wrong size or they have splits and a lot of cedar boards have little splits in the end it's nice to cut those away what I like to do is uh because we have stairs here and this whole front is going to be visible from the living room's huge window right and then way at this end we're going to have a step at least one coming off the deck and towards the the rear entrance so we want to incorporate a nosing so we use a technique called picture framing so all the boards are running this way but at the very end we want one board coming this way that overhangs like a bull nose and so we're going to frame that up in just a second and show you how to do that we also have to Square Off that end because it needs to come forward a little bit and then we'll anchor that with our hurricane straps and then we're just going to be loading all of the cedar onto this deck and strapping it nice and tight for when we get a chance to do the install and then day is done but first let's show you how to frame up a picture frame because that'll be crucial it gives you a lot of flexibility if your deck is just a little bit larger than the wood that you have available adding a picture frame gives you another seven inches of Dimension and so it is a really effective technique I'm just gonna have a quick break first because thank God this backyard gets a lot of shade but in another hour or two it's going to come around the corner here and there'll be no more hiding anyway all right Matt I gotta eyeball this I need you to pull that corner forward [Applause] foreign [Music] 's getting done well you know what that wet wood needs to Blade up pretty quick yeah okay so we got that let's move this out of here okay every 16 inches so this is how we're installing our deck boards across the joist makes sense right but if you want to have a really nice deck that's not a finished service so we're going to install them around there and you help me get that over there right across the front and move that other stuff out of the way we're just going to get the visual so we're framing this up right it's rough okay that's a lot of overhang right you can step on this and roll so that's a decent that's a better looking finish because you don't see the end okay I wish I had just a little piece of this stuff cut off but I don't a better way to finish this is actually to bring this up like a nosing okay how about a three-quarter inch all right and then the best way to finish it is to take some cedar whether it's the same kind of board or like a one by three and put it across the face for this to sit on all right so then you know what that depth is you add the three quarters plus the three quarters go one and a half you can finish with that and then put lattice to the bottom that works great so you don't exactly know where the end is so when we're putting on our boards we're guesstimating here right so by adding a 2x4 and then another joist we've now created this massive amount of meat so we're going to do is always install your board to the middle of the 2x4 all right and then when you're all said and done you can come by with whatever piece you're going to put on the edge you can lay it over on top of all of the wood to the right depth you can pencil the line because this is going to have its own character it's going to have its own movement it's kind of going to be perfectly straight you can't chalk line and force the wood into position it's easier to set it in position pencil Line run it with a skill saw cut all the excess off and then you just drop this in on some PL premium that's how you do picture frame so knowing the end from the beginning now you know how to frame it outside Joyce flat 2x4 another joist nail it all together install all your boards to the middle and then you are golden okay about this because some of you are going to be in the comments going what the hell are you doing that for Jeff and some of you are like oh that's the right way to do a deck uh this is just joist tape okay it's just the weatherproofing membrane it's a one-sided goo I mean at the end of the day because I'm making all this flat stock here because I'm going to do the picture frame it's going to take forever to dry water is going to get held here and trapped here and so it will be the first place of the deck that rots out so what I'm doing is I'm adding the joist tape in this area only my recommendation for the using joint joist tape is simple take a look around there's no trees you don't need it right water will fall and it'll dry and the air is going to have access to the joist between the gaps of all the boards not an issue if you're in an area where you have a lot of trees it becomes a little bit different now it becomes real vital right because if you're not going to take the time to pressure wash all of the needles and the leaves out of the joint out of the joints that trapped Organics when it gets wet really rots and once you have rotten wood up against fresh wood the fresh wood starts to rot so if you don't keep your deck clean yeah you know joist tape but if you're one of these people that's like you know once a month you're out there and you've got your pressure washer and you're cleaning out your deck or if you're in a neighborhood like this with no trees not necessary I'm going to do two runs of it I don't want my deck rotting prematurely that's all and the only reason I really care is because this is a brand new house in a brand new neighborhood with a brand new deck so you know it's not going anywhere for the next I don't know 50 years it'd be nice if it lasted that long that's like bulletproof weatherproofing here I'm going to finish off that whoa by the way I've never used this brand of product before I'm really pleased like it has great adhesion to the other membrane but it gives you a little bit of workability if you mess up your joint that's awesome we just got to put all the wood up here now strap it together see more here that are good lift this up slide them over so we know that the first few rows are all figured out already now we can just bring the rest of the boards here I'm not going any closer to the edge here because we got to get in there for the fasteners so at the end of the day when you've got your materials all delivered and the weather's looking grim and you know now the weather report is not going to allow you to come back and do any more work on your project for a few days here's the solution to Twisted wood stack it strap it don't get sung by a bee there you go that's cool the end of the day if you're going to be a few days between jobs make sure you strap your wood um it'll really minimize the amount of curving and warping that happens and it uh it makes a little more difficult for someone to come in your backyard and steal it while you're sleeping this fence is three years old and it is a cedar fence and it's already gone to mold and to fungus let's go through the stages because when you've got a gray fence you got to clean it first we're using this deck cleaner basically it's a bucket of bleach okay and it's a concentrate if you read the instructions it'll tell you if it's not bad you can mix it one per one one per eight so this is like what a gallon yeah you can go one per eight gallons and that's great and if it's really ugly you can go one or three the point is this bleach whenever comes in contact with Organic like fungus and mold it gets destroyed as it does the killing okay if you're not sure and you don't want to work that hard just go to one to three and that's what we're gonna do we have a major labor shortage so if you're going to do anything around your house consider just getting the job done yourself here we go don't pour too fast and pour on the side like this so if you go like this you're going to get all kinds of air but you go like this okay you got a lot more control and you're not going to glug which means it won't Splash boom remember it's bleach so if you're going to be weird about it and make all kinds of splashing wear glasses I'm putting all this in a pill for reason because I got a deck brush I stick it on a pole but here's the deal my deck brush is a little bit too wide to get in this pail first order business has cut off a little bit of the deck brush this is the perfect size for deck brush no the guys who make these things think about it we're using a pail make it fit what are you going to do put this in a paint tray liner mix up just a few ounces at a time all right now now I can get all the way to the bottom of that bill good to go now this is really simple because it's bleach the goal really is to get this water from here to the top and let it run down and remember some of this might work its way around to the other side of the fence where the neighbor is but if they're not taking care of their side of the fence means they don't really care so they really don't have a license to complain all right now the reason I'm doing this is because I'm gonna be staining my finished deck as well right hard to stain the finished deck if I don't get this seed or change color back to its original Glory okay you know what amazes me is in here in Ottawa all the new construction they're famous for putting up these cheap Cedar fences to separate the backyards from the streets and the walking areas and all that sort of thing and so the entire town is full of rotted out Cedar on neighborhoods that are 20 years old and they're all decrepit and falling down and falling over but because it's the city's problem they're the ones that have to replace all the fences so think about it you got a product that's designed to last 50 years but they never put caps on them so the posts were out pretty quick and then they don't put any kind of finish on it so the 50-year wood only lasts 20 years so you got millions and millions and millions of dollars of Cedar fencing all over town countless number of trees cut down to make a pretty fence you know Cedar actually costs almost twice as much as pressure treated lumber but instead of using pressure Tree Lumber they use cedar and then it goes gray here this is a joke check this out this is three years old take a look at the stairs that are built off the back of the house pressure treated lumber three years old you tell me which one you'd rather have as a fence it is kind of funny though because at the end of the day even if it was a pressure treated fence and you waited a couple of years before you put your stain on it you can still put a cedar color stain on pressure treated and it would look exactly the same so if anybody knows why the hell we're cutting down Cedar to make all of this infrastructure when no one's taking care of it I would love to know because that's part of the reason why seat are so bloody expensive because they use it in applications like this when no one takes care of it you know me on my channel I like to be practical there's nothing practical about putting sexy wood on a fence just to let it rot out lots of folks out there they're like oh I love the look of grade Cedar I'm like there's no way in hell you're gonna tell me that's sexy the only people who like grayed out Cedar are either crazy or lazy but this only takes a couple of hours and you don't even have to wash it like this if you hurry up and get it done when you get a brand new house now a couple minutes we're going to show you how to stain it I'm gonna let this all bleach out I'm starting back at the beginning just because uh it works better in the sun it's not very sunny day today so I got enough water here I'm gonna try to get a second coat let's see if we can do so a lot of you right now are screaming Jeff why aren't you using a pressure washer well here's the thing guys I'm using pressure washer yes you'll get a cleaner faster you're also going to raise the surface of the Grain and it'll accept the stain really nice probably accept it better than the deck boards we're trying to get something uniform but here's the thing look at this neighborhood 30 units and what three acres like think about it I'm not expecting this everyone on the street doing a pressure washer now if you're going to make a living doing this for people by all means get a pressure washer make your life simple but the purpose of this video is to empower the other 29 homeowners on the street to fix their own damn fence without having to borrow my pressure washer and if it's this easy I mean a little Blood Sweat and Tears here Greg big deal yeah I'm working whatever fill a good sweat I only have to do this once so you know I'm at my daughter's house and she done it when she first got the place I wouldn't be sitting here scrubbing this thing right now but everybody has priorities right so think about it if you just bought a house maybe make sand in your offensive priorities so you don't have to go through all this hassle a good penetrating stain with UV protection is going to last five to seven years before you have to reapply if you use the right product you don't even have to sand or wash or nothing I'm feeling pretty good here I'm gonna hit that one section one more time and then we're gonna get on with it and yes I could have used a paint stick it's the same thread and if you're working in a place where you don't have a lot of space you can't have a big stick picked this up it's like three bucks you can just cut it in half on your saw work with a little one but I wear gloves if you're gonna be close to the water no let's take a look at how nasty this is I'm going to just pull out the suds here for you so you can see how incredibly Gray This is see how much dirt is in there already that's how much just came off as soon as I touched it with the brush can't wait to get a hose on this bad boy I love how a good solid rubber hose like this it's like Kink free and then somebody comes along and makes something that looks like a solid rubber hose but it's it's kind of like a mixture of rubber and plastic it's just not the same quality but designed to look like it the old days if it was green it was plastic it was black it was rubber life was simple now they make imitation plastic to look like rubber okay we're gonna take a 20 minute break let the bleach do its job I mean you can see already here look at all the crud that's just sitting on the surface waiting to be washed up okay let's be patient Jeff sometimes moving forward is moving backward see obviously this stuff works um the secret here really is pressure getting in the grooves and to clean out the grain you've got to brush with the grain you'll see the brush lines here when I went the opposite direction now I want to get rid of those so now I've got to get the fence wet rub with the grain get everything in the right direction so when I stain it I don't have brush lines okay so with the board and you're going to see a bunch of crap coming off right that's the that's the group that I'm trying I'm looking for now this process isn't without its work like I said if you have a pressure washer use it if you don't you can still get a good result the goal here is to get the cedar as clean as you can so when we're done doing the rest of our deck it's all stained together looking good focusing on the the tops and the bottoms where all the goop is it's gonna wash my brush too it's filthy that's what we're going to do and now that we showed you the basics we're going to let the cameraman get out of the way Matt and I are going to get busy we're going to jump right into the stain Maddie what yeah right you know what it's taken for me not to do this right now [Laughter] this is my favorite stain guys but if it sits still for too long like when your videographer gets covered and you got to wait two weeks to finish off the project you're going to find us incredibly settled so all of the UV protection there's like a pace sitting on the bottom of the ground it's thicker than toothpaste so this mixer is just a little redneck but it'll get the job done there we go watch feet better to have 80 of your stain UV protection than none at all or 70. yeah this is a little redneck sometimes the store is just too far away there we go I'm happy with it let's get to work all right so basically the concept is this you wash your fence down it starts to dry you start working where it's just drying out the wood itself is actually a higher level of moisture at this point the pores are open and ready to receive a stain and we're going to use what's called a penetrating sealer stain quick history lesson we used to use oil back in the day oh save the planet we stopped with oil and we had to cut down twice as many trees because the fences didn't last because we were using a water-based product okay maybe we go to go back to oil then somebody came up with new water-based penetrating stain so we can get rid of oil again so here we are flip side now we got a product that is water-based penetrates the wood and it doesn't skin most products are out there oil included skins on the surface it sits on the surface okay there's your oil now the water base used to go in there but it also had a skin this is where we ran into problems because water-based didn't last very long and so after three or five years depending on what surface how much sun your geography it would blister and peel and that skin would come up and then you'd have to scrape and sand and law that prep work that everybody went mad over now we got a penetrating product that goes into the wood without a skin and so all of the protection against UV rays and everything is happening in the wood and when it wears down you'll notice because when it rains it's not going to beat up okay you won't get that that silicone windshield effect anymore and all you do is you come along and you add one more coat of this product and it goes back into the wood again because now it's absorbing product it'll absorb this another coat nothing ever sitting on this on the surface so not only stain we never have to sand and scrape ever again that's what makes this product amazing that's why it's my favorite that's why if you're going to use a stain you see two guard pour it into a big pail like this okay use this brush to constantly mix it as you go this makes a mess which is why I'm using it on the fence first we'll do the deck later and we're going to use the deck with a different system so make sure you subscribe to the channel a lot of really good tips and tricks it's going to be a huge deck built-in benches privacy screen we're rebuilding the stairs every fire feature okay you're not going to want to miss it so because it's water-based we want to start the top because it'll always drip down all right now this is our privacy this is the property line and less is more here you don't want to put too much pressure all right and we're gonna just wet the surface it's kind of like painting an interior wall you want this brush to be wet enough that'll right drip but not drip see that perfect this will keep you under control right here now the best thing you can do with this product is do one piece of one at a time because it's a penetrating sealer you'll get those overlap marks if you're not careful whenever you're doing horizontals nice and clean brush make sure you're watching your Edge which is down here okay again you're painting from inside you're not having a ton of excess product it's not dripping all over all right if you're not sure if you've never done it before find a discreet place where you can practice a little bit first go upside down with a little more pressure and once it's drying out if you do upside down first it'll drip everywhere and then board like that the underside of that board and then do the board okay nice and simple all right this is the whole process nothing really to it now you want to stain what I call wet on wet which means you're going to get two coats of this okay the first one is going to open up the pores the second coat is going to provide that superior protection that you want for long term but remember whenever you touch a piece of wood you want to finish it or you're going to get overlap marks all right because it is a penetrating sealer and once it penetrates it starts to seal and so you will get overlap Mark's the stain penetrates in a different layer of the wood all right that's the secret right there now what I've done is almost three minutes of work three minutes is kind of my my factor on a day like today today we're what in the low 20s Canadian temperature uh probably 80 degrees okay in the American scale so what I'm looking at doing here is about three minutes worth of work if it's hotter maybe two minutes if it's cooler maybe four minutes five minutes all right give it a chance to absorb in because this really is just opening up the pores and when I've done three minutes of work I'll go right back to where I started it's very important to keep an eye on where your production schedule is here there we go just for good measure I'm gonna do my last horizontal board there that's three minutes you have an option with this product these brushes this is that same Universal thread so you can always go get a big stick if you're not trying to be as precise okay we'll do this post again wet on wet so before it fully dries you want to get the second coat on okay and that'll help the first coat to penetrate even deeper and I know not everybody's going to treat this like you're painting in your house trim I like to just because I know what happens if you get spots on the wood it shows up a little blotchy now a lot of people ask me where can I go to get a good stain what do I think about what's available at the box stores and at this point right now my advice is really simple avoid the Box Store for products like this and this is the C2 it's my favorite paint guys and if you're interested in getting this as you're stain there'll be a link in the video description everybody in the United States can get this mixed and then delivered to their house a can of stain is actually free shipping and 20 off with our code so I'm going to recommend it if you live in Canada we don't have that service yet but if you're in Ottawa head down to Randalls say hi to the team down there tell them Jeff sent you all right up the coffee there we go just set it straight down flush there you go and we'll just Mark that off there you go because that one so high hold on um this is a 10 this is an eight okay now we got the frame finished let's jump into this planing got a few spots over there and one board over here every time you buy wood from the store it doesn't mean it's gonna be exactly the right size so be prepared with a planer whenever you're building a deck one thing that we just don't want dude so we don't want anybody coming on and off the stack at the step and having things bouncy some people especially when they get older they get lose their uh lose the strength in their step right so we're gonna put on a hurricane strap just to hold everything nice and tight and I'm going to put the screws on the piece that goes down on an angle this will just guarantee that it gives a nice pull on the downward Force there we go okay solid as a rock that's the way I like it so here on this channel I like to show you my mistakes as well and how we fix them and here's one simple one once we got all the wood out of the way we realized that this beam wasn't level at this back corner it was it was a little bit down and that's just a result of starting the middle doing the left doing the right side having all the wood stored here on site you know you're tripping over yourself sometimes when you have no storage right so I wanted to show you this I'm going from ridge beam to the second Ridge here you can see that I'm an inch short and this isn't because of the woods crowned demonstrate it this is actually pretty straight piece of wood I'm still in it short so because I'm an inch short I'm going to use just a sliver off of one of my deck boards I know already that because I'm going to use a nosing across the front I'm going to have a bit of trimming to cut off here now having this problem actually gives us an opportunity to demonstrate what you do in the springtime after a few years if you ever have an issue let's take a look at here landscape glass okay what we have here is a concrete post that has a one and a half inch Gap and so if we can lift this post we can slide a shim in underneath and so since we're an inch short we're going to add a one inch shim right here and we're just going to use a little bit of Leverage because we have a box beam anytime you can grab a 2x4 or a two by six if you need to a couple of guys lift it up have someone slide in the shim no big deal the worst thing that can happen is it'll fall back into place so you can you can grab your six-year-old to crawl underneath the deck and do that for you all right this way it's not as strong as that way okay so cut your thickness that you want and slide your shim in with the grain facing up okay you want this grain facing up cut one inch thick this way so because we're on ground putting one bite down we're gonna go oh get there's as much leverage as you can that's good okay if you can just lift that for me and up a little bit more and more there we go and boom loving it let's put that board back on and see how she looks ah oh what do you mean oh now we're low on this side really got to do another ship cut another board if we got the height of the deck wrong it's okay it's not the end of the world let's start over here I'm going to add my joist tape now if you missed this in the last video just a quick reminder the reason we're doing this is because we're going to go with like a picture frame front which means I can have one board going along this way so the Finish is a beveled edge and a nosing effect and then we'll tie in all the boards underneath it because we're going to have the boards going this way there's a propensity to trap water here and we want to encourage a healthy healthy strong environment there because it is a bit of a safety issue for people walking on the deck if the edge of the deck rots out let's just go long and tight there we are when you're going to do the joist planting like this if you're working as a team remember not everybody frames the same so I know Matt likes to throw a nail from the top on an angle into the rim joints going this way so I gave him the marker he's going to walk around identify with a circle any nail head that needs to be sunk and he's going to put an x on the top of any of these that have to be planed it should just be a couple here most of them are over there so I know I got two here three here maybe four okay here's what a planer is um I know this is on right now so I'll just keep my hands out of the way here's the blade right there kids okay good planer has two blades like this on the same wheel watch how fast that spins all right you do not let that come in contact with any part of your body all right the way the knob works is this zero right here down on the bottom and we have all kinds of adjustments 164th look it's just minor stuff right now in most cases 1 16 of an inch means 18 of what I'm going to take off makes one inch that still looks pretty non-aggressive and for what we're doing I'm going to go in half of that 130 second and all I'm going to do is I'm going to find the high spot and if it doesn't feel like it's very high I'll just start about a six or eight inches out okay notice the back here that'll sit High onto a purpose so you want to start back you roll forward and then you want to turn the trigger on and then just push it's still not flush I'll go back another few inches [Music] [Applause] [Music] and that'll end up graduating that plane until it's nice and flush that's all it is [Music] this only takes a minute but it's the difference between a great job and an okay job okay [Music] remember we're painting for effect here not for presentation stir the bottom in as you work guys make sure you're getting the all that goodness in there okay there's no such thing as putting on too much of the stuff this little jar here probably will cut the end of three 400 boards okay so you don't it's not like they're going to run out you want to put it nice and liberal on there let the wood soak it all up okay here we go beautiful foreign [Music] somebody's gonna be like oh my God you're weakening your wood yeah right okay I'm taking an eighth of an off the point is is that this is the two by eight and a two by eight floor joist can span 12 feet we're only going eight feet box to box so it doesn't take a rocket science to figure out that I'm gonna have plenty of structural strength this is one of the reasons why you don't want to go undersized on your wood when you're building because then you really do put yourself in a situation like if I use two by six I'd have to have a beam every five feet and then if I started doing this man that's going to be dramatic right because it's not about I'm taking an eighth off it's the percentage total of the thickness of that board that would be an issue oh and just a reminder the reason this is necessary is because it's a box beam which means I have two pieces of wood bolt on a post and they have their own different Crown situation okay so my meeting in the middle um it is possible for one side of this board to be higher than the other and so when you're building just don't worry about it just keep moving forward come back this takes 10 minutes as we're putting on our deck boards if we get to a point where the water is going to land right where everything is nailed together it's probably not a great idea because you don't want to have all of the ends of your Fasteners exposed to all that rain so if it's going to be a joint I'm going to cover that in joist tape just give a little extra protection this is the location I'm talking about so if I have my two deck boards and they land right here for instance that means all those Fasteners and where they enter and come out of the wood on both sides it's exposed extra water and I can't seal that so if that happens I'll throw a joist tape right down the middle the water diversion system the deck boards might only last 50 years but the the frame itself probably lasts 100 if you take good care of it the secret okay so I'm just going to show you the plan for the deck here's the corner that's me right here okay this is the box beam and here's our floor joists what we're going to do is when we're finished putting all of our boards on I'm going to have an inside table here I'm going to build in a custom eight foot sofa on each side and then we're putting a fire pit right here so my goal is to then I'll identify where this location is because I want to have my gas line come underneath the deck and come out of the deck right here generally speaking when we do this my gas guy he's like you need conduit and so inch and a half ABS works great try to find inch and a half ABS at the store right now maddening so we move two we're spending more money than we need to but it'll be easier to pull and so if this is the whole deck our gas comes off the house over here so we're going to run it conduit all the way to this location we'll attach it to the frame using galvanized strapping and we'll put a line in it but I got to figure out this location so my benches are 18 inches deep and that takes me to here and then I want to have at least two feet From the Bench to the fire table and even that seems a little bit close we'll go 30 inches okay so this is my 30 inches off of here and I'm doing exactly the same thing over here bench space so we'll go four feet that'll be to the edge of the fire pit haha but my fire pit is also a 32 so right there it'll be my measurement to the middle so I'm going to do 64 inches from both directions this choice is going to come in real handy so there's the middle [Music] so what I'm going to do is bring my pipe underneath to here throw an elbow on it that way when and when it's time we'll be able to cut a small hole in this area and then we can pull the soft copper pipe all the way through for the gas line put a fitting on it flare it connect it with a flexible hose drop the fire put in position on a finished deck and it won't be of any consequence because the pit is going to go from here to here and so all the weight will rest on these joists and this one will just be for Joe okay good to know the end from the beginning now I've got location just going to glue together some pipe real quick throw in a couple fittings run my string that was the third thing I have to do and then it's time to start decking can't wait today because we're going to use the camo Fastener system I'm going to show you how pretty it's going to look my design versus a traditional just straight board install all right let's get at it all right so I'm going to tie a deck screw to the end of my string yeah so I got some gravity working in my favor I gotta go 12 feet there it is got a coupling and then I'm gonna have one more piece of pipe and I got to measure that off first so let's take the total length of the deck which was eight feet fifteen 15 feet we'll finish the pipe underneath the edge here because then I can put a skirt on and have the condo hidden So it's 15 and then this is 64 10 7 15 feet 20 inches three feet four foot eight four foot eight one two three four five six seven eight I'm gonna cut a little bit short because I'm going to use long sweeping elbows [Applause] okay this just get that on the string pipe elbow coupling okay and just because I know my gas guy when he's finished he's going to use silicone to seal it all up about a bushing so it doesn't have quite such a huge hole so I'm going to glue this together and feed it underneath the deck piece of cake really now this does not have a requirement to be waterproof per se so I'm not going to do adhesive on fitting and the pipe I just need this to hold up underneath the strength of running that line now I'm not sure what it's like where you all live but where I'm from long as you have a gas technician running the line to this scenario I don't need a permit just got to follow the rules unfortunately for me Brad my gas guy b-rad he's the one that did our gasoline for the fire pit at The Farmhouse if you're not familiar with her Channel yeah renovate an entire 1880 Farmhouse from top to bottom and we put a fire feature in that one okay here we go he told me over the phone just go run your ABS pipe gave me the depth because there was going in a patio my understanding with this kind of thing is as long as the conduit is attached to the structure there's no issues so fingers crossed when he gets back from vacation we'll find out if we did this right make sure you subscribe the channel and follow along with the journey because I might have some egg on my face I might be crawling around underneath this deck later on some adjustments to my structure here but I like to have the end from the beginning guys you know that but in this particular case this is just a good educated guess I'm not bothering him on vacation to find out okay so before we glue this elbow we're going to slide this all the way along and see if we're feeling lucky ouch there we go other side I got a lot of wood here and I don't know why okay the message outside all right okay so that's that's good here if I was to turn it underneath because I'm going to build a little 2x4 frame here hang some Square lattice off it just so that the neighbor kid balls don't go running underneath I don't need them crawling underneath my deck okay let's go see how that turned out okay so this is a good location I'm going to show you one of the trick to keep water from filling up that line while we're waiting for gas guy to come and that is this I'm just going to take a piece of joist tape and seal the end of that pipe we can keep water out okay oh I got to get this to play ball now don't I lucky okay right there beautiful um I'm also going to throw a screw in the side of this joist and hang the string off of it here we go now I've already got my screw problem solved right there so now it's not going to fill up with water it's in the right location screw's gonna make sure I don't lose that string 64 inches out I'm just going to grab my camera take a picture of this measurement so that I can remember later on to come 64 and 64 to drill that hole life is good every time you go close that up it gets almost impossible to open the end okay let me show them my pipe there is facing up [Music] now I can put this one on okay here we go of course it's got to be tighter than that twist here make sure everything's nice and glued up and one more coupling over here that's enough for now I'm on the exposed side of the deck so I got no problem coming back to finish this off once Brad's in town as you can see just on the other side of the barbecue is the hookup for the barbecue he's going to split that line so the barber can beat me on top of the deck another line can feed into here and I'll wait for him to tell me what I need for requirements going back to the house I'm gonna have to add another two by then going all the way to the house maybe even on a post I'm not sure but I'll wait for him to tell me about that in the meantime let's get going on the decking boards it's about time there's a couple things we want to go through real quick let's just take a look at here's a here's a standard installation nice and simple if you make your deck 15 feet and eight inches long you can go the 16 foot board have a little overhang just install them straight right across and that's what that looks like uh not terrible but all of these end cuts are in the made in the factory and they're not clean and they'll stain a lot different than the surfaces so it can be a problem what I like to do is this way add the nosing which is why we built out this box out of the tape add the nosing and then before we install all the boards we're going to take our palm sander we're actually going to round all these edges and clean this up as well that makes all of this super sexy and then I can set my nosing for the depth that I need now in this case for the purpose of the demonstration I put it in a little deeper but I am going to bring it out a little bit further I'm going to rip one of these boards in half and stick it underneath and then from this point down I'm going to add a lattice to close off the bottom okay so we're going to intentionally install this a little bit deeper than we need so that we end result is something like this looks a lot like a stair then we can build a box step here and it'll be look real natural and that'll be it so it's just a matter of getting a layout that you like making sure that you install your boards like rainbows not like happy faces take a look at the grains this one would be officially upside down because that's a happy face what happens here is this little knot in the middle this piece ends up lifting out it gets a little bit of water in there and over time you get sliver sticking out so these boards need to be flipped okay to identify looking for rough surfaces that need a little bomb sander work this is a rainbow as well rough surfaces probably a good idea because the place I go to buy a much heater they always get the best stuff that's available in the country there's a relationship with the owner and the mill even with that you're still going to get some edges like this okay the trees were cutting down getting smaller and smaller every year try to incorporate some bench seating or make your deck a little bit shorter than what you need so you can cut off some of these rough edges the worst case scenario if you had to absolutely and you installed it this way we just just realize when you install it as a happy face you are probably going to get cupping like this like the happy face okay remember Cedar's a soft wood Lumber it likes to twist as it grows and it houses natural tendency to want to warp so it's going to cup like a happy face where it's going to cup like this it's going to get pronounced okay this gets rid of water that holds water and when you hold water like this this little bit right here ends up sitting underwater for a long period of time and if it's in the shade it'll end up lifting no amount of stain and ceiling is going to protect you from that you probably have to do maintenance on it every single year if that's the case all right so in order to set this nosing up remember I'm going to take one of these five quarter boards we have at least one of them here that's like a real hockey stick when you cut it down the middle it creates a nice little one and two and a half inch piece um but that's one inch thick so I want a three quarters nosing which means if I come off the edge of my deck here because I'm going to be adding that bench seating one and three quarters I know it sounds aggressive right now but right here is a perfect location okay and then I'll add that other piece after the fact now I'm not a big fan of this generally speaking I like to use the camo screws I'll show you how that works in a minute but it doesn't show any surface screws but in this case in this situation where I'm creating a nosing I want to have a big head with downward pressure into the lumber and I'm going to use a regular deck screw make sure you buy the brown they make two colors they make brown and green in the old days the green was for pressure treated lumber because it was treated with green stuff and then we had Brown for Cedar now even the pressure treated is brown so if it's not a hidden Fastener make sure you're getting the right color screw because after the sun gets to it for a while you don't have a bunch of little green dots all over your deck that would look kind of silly wouldn't it we're going to come back a few inches three or four one inch off the wood four inches off here in reverse burn that a little bit and go perfectly flush or maybe just a touch of a dent you don't want to holding too much water the end of the day this is the weakest spot on the deck so how this one board performs is crucially important now what you want to do is you want to go every 16 inches okay you want to measure am I still at one and three quarters right in this case I'm not I'm way up okay and you want to put that screw in every 16 inches and you don't want to get a sliver okay if you go too deep the wood fibers will break off and then stick up in there and then people will be using your deck and their bare feet because people still do that and then we'll get slivers and they will get infected and when they wake up the next morning drunk on your floor they're gonna be like oh my foot hurts what did you do to me it'll be all your fault because you didn't take the time to set the screws the right dip okay see that those fibers are dangerous okay now the next step of course after you get your nosing set up properly is to set up the camo screws we use a separate bit make sure you buy the camo bit don't just try to find something in your toolbox that kind of works it'll end up stripping and the tool and the bit driver worked together in harmony okay so it's the kind of shaft and where the location for the Finish is as well I'll just demonstrate that on real wood why not here's the screws they come in two different sizes the short screw is French English one and seven eighths okay it goes off the off the board like that around the corner okay and then it goes into the joist down here and then when it's fully engaged the screw will be down here like this underneath the surface of the wood okay and you'll have one on each side causing that pinching action to keep the boards from warping it's actually a really efficient system because the downward force is the whole shaft of that screw and it's designed so that it drills in here and the threads reverse here to pull that board tight to the joist okay so you don't get loose Lobby boards it's amazing now you don't need the real long ones the real long ones are if you're using two by six Lumber because it's thicker wood the short screws are fine save your money you're not getting any advantage buying the longer screw all right we've already identified all the boards and where we want to put them this board has a nasty piece of damage here can't use this board unless I flip it and at the very end is damaged but it's going under my benches this one we're fine got a couple of rough spots here I'm going to clean up and I'm going to definitely polish the end [Music] all right now that polished Edge up against the next deck board with a small gap for expansion and contraction looks amazing you get this bevel it's the same bevel that's going to be on the rest of the boards that way I'll just show you how pretty that is compared to that which would you rather see on your deck in order to get an excellent job you're gonna need a chalk line to start first board we're going to put on that chalk line we're going to manipulate it into position we don't really care how the board feels about it we're going to need a 2x4 small section okay because what we can do is we can throw a screw on that and we can use this to push and force the boards closed without causing damage to the wood the wood of wood contact leaves are just really small amount of damage easy to sand out if you have a really stubborn board um other than that get your screws get your camo gun and your palm sander and be uh be patient this doesn't take forever but it sure takes work well what we're going to do is we're going to throw this bad boy on the Inside Edge and see if we have a straight line that looks really good eh yeah yeah um I'm going to switch back to a couple of surface screws on the outside edge and I'll tell you why the camel screw because it goes on an angle every time there's a gap between the two boards it'll pull or push okay once you've got the first board in it's easily manageable okay Okay so by going straight down on the end I'm able to make sure that this board isn't going to be moving around on me foreign minimum amount of surface screws and I'm also going to have that corner table and then eight feet of bench here so I'm only going to have two visible screws on this whole board [Music] now I'm going to have a straight surface that I can manipulate [Music] that's awesome and anywhere that I'm not going to have visible screws I'm going to use a surface screw under the bench because [Music] the bench is going to provide so much protection anyway [Music] against the UV it'll never Decay underneath that bench faster than it will in open space you're going to want to do at least your first row of screws on Surface screw anyway so start in the most non-visible location in my case because I'm having benches this is the most non-visible location this allows me to use all the bad wood and start with surface screwing you'll see in a minute when we start putting those warp boards up against it why having something straight to start with is so important [Music] now here comes the trick if you're working alone you're gonna have your camera go out and get some of these Empire squares okay A little eight inch or whatever they are six seven eight six seven inch they have the same diameter or same thickness as the camo so what you do is you start off over at your end you start off by pulling the trigger and this gets wider okay watch this okay so it won't put on the board now when you're releasing the grabs the board okay now automatically you set your space so I can push it like that all right and I want to just leave a little bit of a hair just enough so that it feels like there's a little bit of expansion space there at the end of the day it can expand all at once at the other end I want this tight and this is what I was talking about having the surface screwed straight right now because I have that I can put that wedge there and I can start by screwing on this end in this direction so we'll pull the board in that direction against a board that's not going anywhere yes drop your screw in you set your bit on there and you just push while you screw until this Ridge of the shaft hits the surface that's it not going any further okay now that is what we call the surface and the screw because it's on the side you catch that okay yep all right now if you're working alone and your board's not straight as you can tell this one isn't right it's not bad for a little while you can throw a square over here pull the board open and if you grab a couple of them and pull in there now you'll see the benefit a couple of these okay so I've got this to establish my Gap and every few feet or so I'm going to come along hold that board shut drop that screw and allow that angle if I want to make it tighter I just lift the edge I can lift the edge of the board Just a Touch [Music] pull out my Square and then finish driving it home it's really that simple it is really sloppy here okay so I'm gonna do the same thing when you're working alone you don't have to have extra hands you're trying to set your screw it's sloppy lift the front edge okay as much as you want to go this way you lift it up here because it's a loft triangle if I want to close an eighth of an inch I got to lift it up beneath an inch now it's set in the wood get rid of that screw just watch it driving home and it pulls it tight problem solve once I got that Gap consistent and now it's also a straight board then I can come back on every board okay like for instance right here where the Gap is right now I can load both ends and just go back and fill in all the screws the angle is always perfect and location is always perfect the shaft means you finish the right depth having that Silver Plate at the bottom and contact front and back means that everything is in the perfect location and both those screws will drive perfect every time it ain't proof decking really this is how you can make the nicest deck in the neighborhood now of course if you don't want it to be so difficult you can leave a bigger Gap if you put it out and you start on this side you're always pushing the board away a little bit you're never going to get stuck you're never going to get jammed in it all depends on your personality if you want to have it perfect or if you'd like to just get it done both work one more thing I'm going to show you and then we're just going to jump into time lapse this is a really easy system for getting things done you put a screw near the edge okay and you can see that I need to close this Gap up and this is fantastic if you don't have a structure in the way let me fix that if you don't have incredible amount of strength and you're looking for a way to get multiply your strength here you go good old-fashioned lever you hold up to the top and this gives you the power of 10 men standing here pulling this close you can do with one finger that's a lot of power to manipulate the wood so much power you can put the camo on drop in my screws I can just [Music] close that Gap to where I like it drive it home [Applause] [Music] So for anybody who's driven around and you're seeing decks and you're taking a look at what other people are doing you know kind of dream building you'll see this kind of a system put together it's basically it's a preformed bracket that forms the bench and the back of a bench we're sexing it up a little bit dressing it up a little bit I'm using a better material first of all let me just run through that this is Select Cedar and if you go to a nicer store then the Box Store you'll be able to order this they'll have it in stock this is a 1x6 select it's a higher quality than the fence board right so basically it's not clear Cedar so it still has a few knots so it'll mimic what you see on the floor but it's the same quality as what's on the decking board and this is the kind of product you want to use for anything that's horizontal like a fence or a bench all right so don't just go buy fence boards they're super thin they're super flimsy and they're super cheap and they're not as good a grade and it won't stain this good now it's still pretty affordable relatively speaking remember I'm going to build this table in both benches that's 16 feet of couch and it's uh the wood was 800 bucks so that's just a few hundred dollars a couch not a bad deal very affordable a lot more affordable than a lot of the outdoor furniture you're going to find out there and this is going to last 30 to 50 years not just a couple of Seasons when then all the Wicker comes undone right we built this deck um off right off the rim joist here so my structure and my frame is good on this side but on this side because we built the nosing and just in case you haven't seen the how we built this deck it's important it's part of the aspect of this we'll put the link in the video beneath but this area here is overhanging and it's where we put all the splits and everything else so what I'm going to do is I'm going to trim that back to my rim joist okay so that I have structure on both sides to attach all my brackets I'm just going to put a pencil Mark I'm going to look at the gaps and I'm going to line up the black mark on my saw which is where the cutting happens with where the rim joists are as I go along it should be that simple that's pretty good so we know the approach we're going to take we got to have a plan though we need to know the end from the beginning so a couple of factors one this is the bracket two it's not a very deep bench and my daughter sent me pictures of the cushions that she's buying and it's from the Home Depot website and they're 18 by 46. so we got a depth and we got a length now all of my lumber comes 48 inches and that's nice so what we're going to do is we're just going to build 48 because the cushions for the back are actually different dimension and they actually finish up right at eight feet so the base only go 46 inches but the tops go to 96 inches so that only goes 92. so it's a bit of a weird Oddity we're going to build in an armrest on the right side to adjust for that so that all the cushions fit perfectly but the idea here is we're going 18 inches this is only 10 we got to add 8 inches so since I'm going to go with that because the back is on an angle I'm going to be measuring from here that is 10 inches across the top so I need 18 in total so I'm going to add 8 inches to this that becomes the depth of my bench and that is 16 inches from the edge all right so here's my corner I'm going in 16 inches for one bench and 16 inches for the other bench and then over here we're going to build a table what I'm going to do is I'm going to measure from here now 18 inches over that's my mark okay we'll go in both directions okay so if you're not sure you can't find your mark put a big v on it it's a great way to be able to identify where your mark is down the road now in a perfect world we would install these there's a couple holes here and you'd find a floor joist and that's great reality is because it sits in the middle of the board I'm comfortable just screwing these right in place and if I can get some floor joists involved that'd be great but on this side there's no floor joists so if it's going to work over here I don't have to be paranoid about where the location is over here but I do want to have these basically every 16 inches okay so I'm going to leave room for the inside table and we're going to mark this right here and we're going to just go like this and put the bracket on the side and then the end will be there at 96. there we go that's tons of seating all right now these brackets come engineered it's important to know that there's a hardware package that comes in them and they come with screws that are designed to go with this bracket into your deck service and it's engineered to be a safety device so that you can use these on decks that are higher than two feet off the ground for us we don't care we're not on permit we're under two feet from the ground but we're still going to use the same Hardware you're going to need to get yourself a couple of tools in order to install this properly but no big deal we're going to Jump Right In and get all these brackets in play because there's no reason to wait there's also locations on the back as well [Music] let's throw all the brackets in we'll measure off for the other bench we'll finish cutting the deck and then we'll jump into making the table because this has to be made separately and then we're going to drop it in place uh just a quick note if you're if you've got a knot in your wood don't try to drive the screw through it all you're going to do is cause a big split what we're going to do is I'm just going to line up a little bit behind about an inch off the front of this one and I'll drive it here perfect but it's a lot better than trying to drive it or not it'll end up breaking you won't get any support from it anyway foreign [Music] to make an assumption that everything that you buy is the same Dimension that it says on the on the little tab at the store is wrong a lot of this Lumber will come from the mill and the ends will be cut on an angle so you want to really just adjust if you're going to buy eight foot lumber then take a quarter maybe even a half an inch off for your off your length and give yourself that room to be able to square off the ends and the Lumbers everything looks nice I went out and bought 10 foot boards I'm going to cut them perfectly Square to eight and then I'm going to use the leftover to wrap this side okay so it'll have this closed off look so I'm fine with that but I am going to be careful to set this right at eight feet so I'm going to measure off here we go I'm just going to try to really pay attention my order of doing things I get a 2x4 that comes in the back of this slot and it follows my arm on an angle so for a back rest and as soon as they're installed I can't be here so I got to kind of install those on my way out which means it's probably best for me to build this inside table get this in place screw it in place and then I can continue working on the rest of these benches from the surface of the deck okay so we're gonna go 18. 18. and then 18. that makes that my corner what I'm going to do is I'm just going to draw this out so using both squares I can measure a four inch face and I can measure to my point on the outside of that so it's squared off so this is three and an eighth I just three and an eighth and if I line this up I'm off just a little bit two and seven eighths you see how this works this is my point that I'm measuring and there's four inches there that's pretty close so we're going to go with that line okay ah beautiful that actually doesn't make any sense I'm building this all out of two by fours so if I go with a three and a half angle it makes more sense let's do the same thing three and a half two and three eighths three eighths yeah that was good okay so there's my inside corner and don't worry about any of this we're going to just use a palm sander to get rid of the pencil marks we're good to go so now I've got something I can actually measure so if I'm going to put a 2x4 here okay that's my 2x4 and it's squared off then I know I need to have a 45 degree cut on this piece of lumber to Build That Wall and a 45 on this Lumber to build this wall if this is my deck surface I want to have my frame standing up so I can attach my boards horizontally okay so I'm not going to think of this like um top and bottom frame instead what I have to do is I have to think of this in terms of just four corners add in this little detail here is going to make this really really irritating I think I'm going to keep it simple why complicate my life it's not going to make that much of a difference so instead what we're going to do is we're going to think about this here's the bench height okay it is 15. and a quarter plus one inch because five quarter deck boards which we're going to use for the bench seat just to give it enough strength to transfer the load um is one inch so we're gonna go 16 and a quarter high and what I want to do is I want to have this table high enough that when the deck boards come across the deck boards come into the Cedar and then the table is a little bit higher okay and that'll help frame the cushions so what we're going to do is take this measurement plus three inches let's say okay 15 and a quarter plus one for the wood make sixty and a quarter plus two more inches to keep the cushion in where it belongs that makes it 18. now the good news is is my Cedar is five and a quarter wide so if I go five and a quarter with a quarter inch gap which is the thickness of my pencil which makes this an easy then I'm gonna go five and a half five and a half 16 and a half three boards takes me to 16 and a half it's in a quarter 16 record that's not quite high enough for what I want to do but I want the boards to look like they're wrapping around so one two three finishes at the right height here so if I want this table higher I almost need to go a full board higher let's do that I think I'm going to like that more five and a quarter plus the quarters five and a half is eleven is 22. so we're going to go 22 inches high I'm just going to cut four two by fours at 22 inches I'm going to cut a bunch of boards um that are the full one by six that my outside Dimension we're gonna go 18 and because I like it to be super sexy I'll just use the miter saw we're going to cut everything with a miter joint in the end to meet nice and clean anyway enough talking let's do it all right call it 22 . [Applause] of course anytime you cut pressure treated lumber take time to add the cut and seal to the end the cedar even when it's cut it's got the same longevity but the pressure treated it will rot out early and then there's no sense putting Cedar on your deck if you're not gonna seal up your pressure treated lumber there we go mission accomplished all right now let's cut our Cedar so what we're going to do is cut it long on purpose to 19. that way I can add the miter after the fact to all the boards and they can all stick out a little bit longer than the frame itself I'll show you when I assemble this how this makes sense 19 20 38 and change really [Music] all right that's enough for that these two are now shorter put them over here so don't forget a lot of cases these boards aren't flat they all got a bit of curve all right so when you're building something like this consider if you're going to put a miter on it okay and the curve is this way you want the miter based on the on the middle of the board so that they can be pushed together all right this isn't about getting it perfect this is about getting it so close that no one's going to really care how perfect it is it's going to be that close all right here we go and great I'm going with a 10 inch saw doesn't cut all the way through that's okay I'm just going to go through them all let's just get this done that's why we cut them 19 give us a little bit of flexibility you know the funny thing is is I was going to be using one by fives is that a one by six on one to go pick it up they were out of inventory [Music] and I forgot to adjust the fact that I only had the 10 inch saw on site and I didn't bring the 12. okay okay now this is the one aspect of the job that most people will ignore but is the most critical is always sand your product before you screw it all together or nail it together all right it's almost impossible to do a good job of this without taking care of it first and if you're happy with the condition of the wood when you attach it you'll be happy forever but if you're not it's really difficult to get the sanding in between all these gaps and grooves [Music] [Laughter] we're talking about sanding The Edge and just softening up the edge you don't want to have an exact point okay and then take a look at the other end that's going to be visible here we go so I'm going to be building on the box here's why basically the deal is this site protection five bucks you can buy a cardboard box and guarantee that you're not going to cause damage to the cedar the tools you know all the rough and the the little stain on the end of this it's going to take an hour to dry so it's just nice to be ahead of the curve here a little bit make a template here real quick okay now this I'm going to just use as my template to identify where I want my end and we're going to be using the hidden fastener foreign [Applause] this is basically the system we're going to use on the entire bench today okay and the reason we're using that is once I get it all installed I'll be able to hose down the furniture that high level of moisture will swell the wood and cover the holes Somewhere over the course of the next few weeks we're going to come back around and we will add the stain but in the meantime there's a couple of weather systems in the forecast and that is good news for us that's going to allow us time for this hole to swell shop okay so just beneath the surface that easy right now time for the next piece [Music] foreign ERS have a remarkably unique situation they're cut off at the tip so they actually pre-drill as you're screwing so you don't split the wood [Music] that's what you get as a finish that's not bad okay so I'm going to just put on the rest of the boards add the other corner and then I'm going to put the fourth Post in the back here we're going to have to square this off get it in place and we're going to cap the top of this with cedar as well here's the million dollar system for doing this you ready two Carpenter pencils carpenter pencil is a quarter inch thick on the flat it's a half inch that way but we're done everything based on the quarter inch and it's easy to work with okay so align this up take my cheek piece work out my outside corner and then drive some screws home this couldn't be any easier you don't have to be a woodworker to make this furniture foreign [Applause] is designed to drive into the wood and this is reverse threaded and it pulls the surface tight that's how you get this amazing result I'm going to try to make this square if we can 17 and a quarter because that's going to make a difference when we go to tap it here we go now there are faster ways to build stuff but if you want sexy you got to take your time build slow and then you'll be just fine remember this isn't rocket science it's just patience that's really the only gift you need to deal to do this here's another secret for you create a hole in the wood with a bit before you start it doesn't run around as much you know what this is also a hell of a lot easier if things are not moving around there we go [Music] now we're not going to be moving [Music] [Applause] okay I'm just using two and a half inch screws a couple of 18 inch piece brackets I'm going to go this way with the finished Cedar so I want to try to get flush with the top here do it on both sides and that will be it for the table piece of cake eh 18 19. 22. yeah we're gonna build just a bit of a nosing and what that means is I'm going to build the top a little bit bigger than down here same thing I'm going to need four pieces yeah all right we're gonna go 20 inches where are we these are what five and a quarter times four is 21. if I go 21 on here yeah we'll go 21. and then the top will be square most of the overhang will be off the back of the deck anyway but it all looked very intentional when I'm done the most practical way to build anything is to build it based on the size of the material that way you can avoid the need for a lot of extra tools [Music] yeah we'll clean up the ends as well because they'll stain a lot better if they're Square okay Emerald applies got to sand everything we touch [Music] you know I just want to be thinking really clearly about this because I've got a sofa coming into the end on both sides so if I'm not flush I have to cut all my other boards around this and that's going to look like hell rethinking going square and we're just going to make the table bigger than the surface okay that's still doable all right now same Hardware applies and this table isn't square right now but it can be I gotta just force it so we're going to line up along this Edge first to my point and put screw on the back all right what we're going to do is I'm going to just finish screwing this line first and then I'll make the adjustment for a square let me just turn this this way so I'm flush here in order to get square here it's just a matter of opening this bad boy up a little bit Oh wrong screw yeah I'm a almost 3 8 out so I'm going to line up my screw off the edge and then I'm just going to use my thumb to move this into position flush Square piece of cake oh yeah now we're getting somewhere once I put this in it'll start to come together pretty quick actually on vacation right now while I'm building this no she knows what I'm doing she just doesn't know what I'm doing she knows I'm building a bench and she knows I'm putting in a privacy screen but the details ah the details got a phone call last night turns out there's going to be a wedding in the family that's nice so hopefully when she comes back I have this finished it's kind of like a wedding announcement present huh not bad all right last board let's get this one on [Applause] [Music] why not it's a bit of an overhang but when it's all put together the furniture will come up to the side and then that doesn't help you very much at all does it the furniture will come across and up the side here and you won't even see any of this detail oh they'll see from the top is a extra large coffee table for setting their drinks maybe some outdoor lights I'll let her decorate that's her business let's go screw it into place I'm just going to right on our corner here we go now that we have this dimension we have to finish cutting our boards off like we did at the very beginning but we know exactly where we're going to finish so we are going to measure off exactly to eight feet and with a little bit of luck of course it's not in the middle of a board all right 96 here we go all right let's get that done we'll get these brackets on and then we'll start building benches [Applause] now I got my bench finish in at eight feet plus the three quarters and in truth is I could probably just run the cut a little long but the last thing I want to see on my finished deck is a saw cut now it's too deep so beautiful thing about Cedar soft wood there we go there that's exactly where the last bracket goes cheers now when we're going and screwing in in the same direction as the boards are running you gotta remember that we're going to be about six or eight inches in and the boards have a propensity you want to I want to split on you so here my bracket's in the middle of a board that's good but everywhere there's a red square except for this one that one's that one's lined up okay that was not terrible but this one's not good that one's not good we got to make some adjustments so here for instance I'm going to move the bracket to this location so it's in the middle of the board and this one I'm going to run off here as well all right this one I'm going to move just just cheat a little bit and I'm also going to go to drill bit I'm going to pre-drill the surface so that I'm not putting so much pressure on that cedar so it doesn't split on me all right let's get this done first thing is first gonna get our brackets installed screw it to the back side [Music] all right guys I know I got a Milwaukee bed set um by metal it's really good set um here's the screw I'm going to use the reason wood splits is not because of the threads is because of the shaft okay now this is designed structurally approved by engineers and sold as a package so that you don't have to get it checked checked underneath what you do is you put the screw underneath the bit and if you can't see the threads coming out of both sides then the bit's too big if you can see the shaft coming out it's too small you want to just go along until you find the right size where you're drilling out just the shaft but not the threads and I think that's winter winter chicken dinner but because of expansion contraction I'm gonna go one shy and give it a try because if that works without splitting I would rather have an overly tight fit right now under a little extra compression because I'm expecting the cedar to dry out and Shrink just a little bit and I don't want it to shrink to the point where it just rips off the threads and somebody sits on the bench that would really suck now the way to do this properly is one screw at a time don't go pre-drilling all your holes because we're going to be working on an angle here see how that whole thing shifted when I did that now I can do the other side [Music] I'm actually pretty happy with this that seems to be working out really well now the next one I do I want you to pay close attention to it because you'll see when I get near the end this all this compresses right into the wood if it doesn't compress and it wouldn't grab really tight that means that the wood is split underneath because you can't see so let's try this again okay [Music] here we go right there see that means I got a perfect grab and that's what gives me confidence if you've ever put in a screw before and just as it gets near the end it just starts spinning yeah that means it's not holding onto nothing now I got to figure out a way to get this to 18 inches that's my finished front okay so these boards are we're going to call them 5 8 just for the purpose of anything and we're going to use the same board across the front we're going to switch to the deck boards for the bench we're gonna switch back to these for the horizontal rise so it'll match up with this give or take okay um yeah it'll be pretty darn close what I need if I'm going to have boards coming this way is I need this sort of support to continue all right and so I thought about the most cost effective way to do this and what it's going to be is I'm going to attach a 2x4 across the front of this all right one and a half inches from the top so then I can also build a a little knee wall on the front and just lay some blocks across to continue on and then we'll clad it all in the Cedar all right so this is going to seem a little painful but it'll be all right so the height of this is exactly 15 and a quarter let's do some math 15 and a quarter minus one and a half minus three it's twelve and a quarter I cut a couple of those blocks and I'll leave my 2x4 on it and just screw them in and then confirm that this is indeed eight feet long yep close it is within a hair all right these ones are also now cut right put that in the cut pile bring this out always always measure your Lumber even if it's supposed to be an eight foot because when you're doing what we're doing there's no room for extra eights it can actually be a little shorter you can still clad something if it's short but you can't work with it as long Golden Rule two and a half inch screw perfect okay now it makes something simple I'm just going to line up location of where these screws are going to go [Music] okay there hmm I did the wrong math yeah that one's going up and down not flat So it's 15 and a quarter minus three and a half plus one and a half five inches about 15 and a quarter that makes this ten and a quarter whoops you're gonna find the longer out here in the Sun the Dumber you get [Music] laughs so the slower you got to move pay attention don't cut a finger off confirm everything as you go be happy with everything you attach here we go [Music] there we go okay [Music] foreign ly that's actually just a little bit too high you can feel that so I'm gonna let that first screw hold everything in place I'm gonna just kind of there we go [Music] same thing just a little bit High [Music] all right I'll just drive a few more screws make sure that every one of these brackets is attached that way everything we do from here on in is twice as strong here's a great opportunity to get a square out [Music] now remember we're doing all the horizontal boards so my build out I need horizontal bars where all these seats are see brackets okay so I want to bring this up to the same height as this and then have a 2x4 come across to carry this load transferred into this and that's going to work out fine so I'm just going to make a series of L's to sit in place and then we'll start we'll start screwing the baseboards on that's gonna be super fast now the height of this it's easier to measure off then Four Thirteen and three quarters okay and we wanted an 18 bench that's ten and a quarter that's seven and three quarters I want it on the Finish I'm gonna go 17 so that the cushions are over top of the finished wood I really got to consider that my cushion comes to 18. so I don't want my framing by more than 17 so then my Cedar facade will be just shy of 18. and allow for a little variance okay so we're gonna go with six and three quarters 13 and three quarters okay all out of two by fours and I'm gonna need seven 14 of them so while I'm cutting this I might as well cut the other side too foreign we're just going to pre-drill the screws mine as well it's just too difficult working with multiple pieces when you only have two hands right all right yeah it's that simple amazing thing is if you don't have a chop saw you can still do all of this with a skill saw and a square this might seem like Overkill but consider this this is still going to take a fair amount of abuse and having that anchored at the bottom it's just going to give me a little peace of mind okay once again [Applause] most important thing I have going on here right now is getting this Square okay so I want to come off my bracket put that in position drive that in now there we go just want to put that on there that's beautiful I am going to drive one screw reverse get my angle [Applause] there we go I'll lock that in a couple of locations now we're going to square this off throw a screw in it's time for lunch so we're gonna go here [Applause] and I'm just gonna put one foot on this here and pull this over ah that is close enough for me and the girls I go out with all right let's grab some money something to eat something to drink before we die after lunch we'll finish framing the other side time to collide it baby this is going to look very intentional now this is where I start to look smart well I'm stupid I was a all right so here's our plan we're gonna wrap the front of this the same as this right only we're going to put the bench on first so they finish at the same height not bad eh so then this this cladding will stick up a little bit proud pick up to the height of there very intentional comes to the back of this bench now I got an 18 inch cushion I'm gonna have about a quarter inch overhang great it's also a about a one and a half inch cushion two inch cushion and the back is 19 which takes it to 21. all right so that's the height of my cushion now if we come back over here you'll see that with the quarter inch spacing floorboards takes us to 22. all right so what we're going to do then is we'll go forwards across the back that takes me to 22. the finished cushion height is 21. I'll even put a cap on it there we go piece of cake just measure backwards always know your cushion size and then you can do your math backwards to come up with the dimensions and definitely recommend building out the base like this for just a couple of bucks you can get a full-size piece of furniture instead of a cheap looking deck Bench this goes from bench to sofa right and it doesn't cost much because these these brackets are actually relatively affordable compared to Wood nowadays they give you all the structural strength and the detail so really pleased with the way this is working out yeah so eight foot sofa outdoor furniture with cushions for less than 600 bucks that's a hell of a good deal so we're just setting this up for production we're going to set it 22. you know this keeps moving around it's going to be a problem I'm going to throw a couple screws in it [Music] there we go now I've got a permanent stop I got this yeah I'm a hair long on purpose because it gives me mercy because I'm face screwing I can always set the corner put in the screw even if there's a little Gap behind this wood it doesn't matter all right so that is absolutely perfect now we will throw a few face screws on here for good measure spacers I ran out of pencils how The mat's Happening helping me here so I'm just coupled in half seem like a bright idea at the time coolest thing about this composite material is it holds a screw really well okay and it goes right through two and a half inch screw to the other side of the bracket that'll lock this in it's not going anywhere actually yes pretty solid my goodness oh that went way too far all right we'll do that again if it goes through the surface it's not holding anything eh there we go I'm going to slower down a little bit all right all right we've decided that the perfect angle for here is 15 degrees that gives me some of a flat top and I am loving this now we're going to just line up the outside edge here any gaps that occur at the other end not going to worry about it it's of no consequence the goal is all about how we're going to finish here because we're going to wrap the cedar around the end just like we did with the Box it's truly the most difficult part of this is going to be the finishing adding the stain because we are going to stain this it is going to be a water-based penetrating sealer and it is going to require a certain finesse so you're going to want to stick around for this by the way the next video in the series is going to be how we take that little tiny Landing off the back deck off the back patio door sorry we're going to turn into something substantial [Music] so let's talk through the plan bottom cushions 46 by 18. okay that takes me into 92 inches all right now if I put two huge cushions out here and I have this much space left over I have a problem but the back cushions are 24 by 19. so with a cushion down here 19 is here is perfect a 24 4 times is eight feet right to here so I came up with a plan basically I'm going to put a two by four right here and then two by fours like this right out to the front Okay so then I'm going to clad it and Cedar wrap it around put a top cap on it make an armrest not bad that gives me 46 to the inside finished and put somewhere to put a drink on this other end of the bench it also wrap around with that miter joint right off here okay perfect and then I'll have this and then we'll just do miter joint just like the the end table we'll run that right to the bottom and then over here I'll put a 15 degree on it boom and I'll I'll overlap the edge of that board just off the back rest there and it'll help keep all these cushions in place I think it's brilliant the only thing I have to do is I have to remind myself to leave enough space for this cushion here so I got to build this armrest oh that's that's an interesting point Jeff they come a little bit shy okay so when I got it all wrapped and clad and I got my armrest on here right I'm holding this one in place but I have room for this one to slide down in behind it oh it's going to be a bit of science but at the end of the day I still think it's going to look amazing to do that let's just tear this old crap apart minimum code means they can put One Nail at the top and two in the bottom of each of these spindles which means step one tear the thing apart ah I'm not as young as I used to be minimum code when an old man can tear it apart with his bare hands yep that's minimum code be careful now don't damage anything and if you want to build something right consider maybe a couple of structural screws wouldn't hurt eh let's take all this off and see what we got to work with we'll take as many screws out as we can [Music] thank you this is called working smart removing as many screws as possible I don't know if this is attached to the house I think it's just the whole structure just sitting on the steel yeah it's not actually attached oh my God wait a minute foreign bolt there how the hell is that attached there we go yeah that's what I'm talking about all right probably three or four screws over here too [Music] we've got these two steel members bolted into the foundation wall and then everything else is just sitting on top so in theory I can take my two by eights and set them on top extend the mode as far as I want to go so I can take three of them a couple of rims come across nail into the rims structural fasteners oh yeah baby we're going to make this as big as we feel like so easy these are bolted to the frame but they're not going to be incorporated into the actual rebuild I'll just get rid of these nice and simple [Applause] and that's it okay this is the nuts and bolts of Our Deck here like it's all a little bit flexible the holes aren't in the same spot not sure I must have drilled these on site because we're going to go 16 inch on Center give or take it's not really all that close but it's hard to get a drill in here to put a nut in too close to this inside corner so I think that's why they cheated but coming back with this bad boy right here a structural screw acts as a lag bolt and I'm going to be using this to put in my wood it's got a washer head so I think that'll be a lot easier to put in the right spot so what I'm going to do is I'm going to measure off and drill some new holes we have there it is you find one that it's just a tad bigger than the hole that I need there we go winter winner okay yeah that's off there's enough 16 and a quarter that puts that one oh these holes are already on it's pretty good [Music] yeah so I was so dramatic at the end eh [Music] all right foreign yeah that's that much out of level over just this 32 inches it is 3 8 of an inch out of level when they're building these things it's a production build right they just stick it on the wall and go it's not even level on the back but it's not quite as bad this is only out 1 8 instead of three hmm so there's a remedy for that and we're going to fix it as we build our frame so I'll show you that in a minute but what we're going to do is just work out our plan here a little bit I'm gonna have a privacy screen coming right across surface deck six and a half feet tall and I'm going to build this platform out to meet the deck but just shy so it acts like a step but this this will float independently of this okay so this is attached to the house and this isn't Four Season weather we can even the frost a bit if it needs to be it won't be a problem we'll leave like maybe half an inch of a gap just for everybody can be comfortable but I don't want to have this much of a cantilever that's really aggressive because we're using structural lag screws on both sides of the steel that'll keep the deck from flipping up okay but I don't have an engineer here on site so thinking I'm going to tighten this up just a little bit so that my privacy screen here will be at this location out to here and then I'll start back here and then carry on and on what I want to do is I want to leave enough room here for someone to be on the deck reaching past the privacy screen to open or close the gas line right so that way you don't have to jump off the end of the deck and then walk all the way around and we want to have access to that okay so it's not perfect privacy but it's close enough like somebody really wants to spy on you they're going to find a way so this is good let's take a look at this side just for the sake of balancing this out I'm going to add a couple of feet on this side as well but I want to come shy of this because I'm going to be putting a railing on that side and we don't want to interfere with that so I'm going to go outside measurement 14. and we'll go to here when you're building a something structural like this that's cantilevered you want to treat every one of these joists like a rim joist you want to double it up so times two okay and when you get to the end you're going to want to do this you want to have this one be the widest and the second one you want to have it come an inch and a half shy okay and then you're going to want to use something like this that has structural screws in it to bring out one joist and then attack a second joist on the outside into this right and then you have the second one here so the two of them add extra strength but then you're nailing everything together at two different lengths as well two different ways two different Fasteners some screws thumbnails it just really multiplies the capacity of that so you can't just rip it apart with your bare hands like the last one we had but I'll get into all that in a minute if I want my outside measurement to be 68 and I'm going to be tacking on a second I have to take off three so we're going to go a 65 inch all right and a 68. so I need 65 and a 62 and then in the second one we're gonna go 62 62 we're just going to make it a double and this one I'm going to go same 62s and then boom boom and then we'll go with another 62 and then a 65 at the other end four five six all right there we go so now I got my frame I'm going to go wide short short wide and then I'll have this going on okay so first thing I'm going to do I'm going to double up and double check my my overhang here remember dimensional Lumber doesn't matter how wide the board is anything that's two is the same thickness so there we go that's relatively flush there and I'm loving that okay this is my long one this is the short one I've lined them up I got my gaps right I'm going to laminate them together now from the back side so when I roll it up into position I don't risk putting a bunch of nails into the siding all right I don't want to keep it away okay okay so let me just do this real quick so I'm going to measure off to screw this from underneath right now we're going three inches past this point here is only one and a half inch pass because I'm going to be adding a board on the outside so I want to go one and a half my Center Line looks to be about eight and three quarters okay so it's eight and three quarters from here to where this Center this is let's just put that on here that's where my bolt goes now this is a bit of a teeter-totter mess okay so two things I'm doing here when I'm putting this all the way towards the siding and then I'm going to pull it off the siding but good quarter or so okay and I'm gonna actually I'm gonna go like that mark my location here four and three eighths four and a quarter okay there we go now I got my starting point I'm Square to the house for whatever that's worth [Laughter] there's my location I bring that black line over to the middle of that rail on my line there we go now I'll do the same with the other one all right sweet now this is temporary we also have a leveling issue and I don't know because it Teeters Mountain if I can do the leveling now or if I got to do it later so I'm just marking three quarters off the center of that hole because wood is one and a half inches wide and I want it Center that hole on this beam here right so by putting that there and then hopefully seven and a quarter come over here put my seven and a quarter mark we'll line those two up and put a bolt in there ah now this is somewhat temporary because I am planning on coming back on this all later on and then squaring off this box but you'll see I can't build anything and as it's tipping over so gotta keep her from tipping over there we go oh we're going to assume that this is square to the house which it isn't and that's fine but this has the ability to move right so I can pretty much square that off as I go bizarre what was that again seven and a quarter right yeah okay and then um that is three quarters there in it yeah so we'll just bring it to the edge of that metal good mission of our structure exciting all right okay let's see how he measures yes very nice it seems like we got ourselves a Warp so what we're going to do is get rid of a warp here this would be interesting enough eh okay the process for this the nails are pretty close to here but we're going to just wedge in my hammer create a gap and then I'm going to drive this screw I don't think that's really long enough to make that work I'm gonna have to get closer to the front there we go okay so now I've got the screw in on an angle now I can get rid of the hammer okay and drive that in and it should pull it down ish yeah when you got a warp on a short piece of wood it's kind of hard to deal with it sink the head far enough just going to grab the planer and fix that so I need to get the end box now 48 exactly 48. well I'll be that's handy because I've got eight foot lumber [Music] 48 and a 45. [Music] so here's my 45 let's see what we got going on here foreign let's find out if we're at all square here I could measure three four five but it's small and I got a square sitting right here wow look at that Lo and be home that's that's freaking me out [Laughter] all right not too often when you visualize it and it's still Square I'm uh I'm gonna put a brace on this before I build anything else okay without putting a hole in my hand this is just temporary okay that'll hold the square while we build awesome we sent it off camera so it's not very much fair to you guys but I showed you how it wasn't level in the back right and it wasn't level on the front but I didn't show you how to level it so I did this earlier I already know this one we're going to assume is level coming off the building we're not going to increase the difficulty I've used the stairs before I never felt like I was falling forward so we're just going to say okay that slope is good but that is 3 8. bam the one in the back was at 1 8. bam I put this in the middle of these two so according to the laws of slope it's two eights bam the secret here is to install that under the beam where there's a hole when I put the screw in it's easier if I can actually see the hole I'm not going to go tight okay so that he can lift it again here we go let's get that one in [Applause] all right what we're doing here is we're adding structural steel and screw element to the beam foreign this is an inside cap and it'll go into this so that this beam is not going to be just nailed to it it'll also be screwed to it I just like the idea of having everything nailed and screwed that's feeling really good to me there I'm going to get on the ground slide up into positioning and use that to stay out of the muck ah people want to know how I stay clean all the time I work like a princess um all right all right should I give you a hand or what once you get out of here please I got in I can share something once I guess one whoa all right wow okay we're going to use joist tape today why not I'm gonna have a lovely Ensemble of your ass in the camera that's level you know I got enough to actually do this this is pretty cool so I don't have to worry about doing any of that cut and seal ah if you enjoy tape you don't need cut and seal yay I mean you can probably get benefit of using cut and seal regardless I was planning on using joist tape out here from the beginning because I had it which is why I didn't use the cut and seal like I did in the rest of the deck whew all right so here we are I'm gonna picture frame this so it's nice so it's pretty just like the deck it's kind of a semi picture frame I'm just going to do one across the front and then we're going to go this way with all our boards just like the deck and in a perfect world I would have measured off and built this to be the exact same size so that my deck boards lined up with these deck boards but it's not a perfect world and it won't really matter so we're gonna go with uh 71 and three quarters whoo that's some decent shape still [Music] I'm gonna do some surface screwing so I've got my overhang at one and three quarters boom all the sides because you guessed it we are going to take Cedar and we're going to Cap all this and make it look pretty later so we want it to be consistent oh there's a secret here for the strength it's because these screws don't really have heads is if I step here the board wants to roll I'm going to add a little more support there later but for now I'm gonna go just off the side there you go now it won't roll we're just going to go a little Overkill one more here all right and a couple of surface screws here as well all right [Music] okay right here we go there we go guys look at that now it's coming together well there we have it gentlemen okay you know the funny thing is these uh hidden fasteners they've been in the industry a long time and still a lot of people don't know about them generally speaking they take about twice as long to install on a deck as a regular fastener and for that reason alone a lot of the guys in the trades shy away from the use of them take a mistake because it more than doubles the life expectancy of the deck so as a consumer make sure you ask about it and ask for the camo system by name specifically because there is another hidden deck system out there where they actually screw a metal bracket to the top of the surface of the deck and then it extends and goes like in a on a like a v-shape back down to the deck we have to crawl under the deck to attach all the screws from underneath back in the day that was the only thing available so if somebody wanted a hidden deck Fastener well that was they were really paying for something special at that point it's like not too many people really ready to crawl along underneath the deck to just to be able to screw it down I'm going to be putting down tools having two of these makes things go a lot faster now I've got to go rip something two and three eighths two and a quarter we need a cutting surface we're going to use this side measure over so I'll screw this down all we do now is I lift the plate a little bit so now I'm guaranteed to cut all the way through but not cut the actual deck when you're cutting the black line is where the blade goes so it's always best to have it on your pencil mark so you don't cut too small here we go and now we shape we want to give it the same bevel as the other side of the wood [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Lego glove okay this is a little trick here now [Music] all right the last part of the project today is to finish installing a little handrail here and as you know we're going with black accent so we've got some caps over there we've gone with the post bases um there's another option you could have always done the 4x4 post as a part of the structure but generally speaking a safety reeling like this just for a couple feet off the ground it's not really necessary to integrate it and it's a little more flexibility for location this allows me to screw the bottom of the base right down right to the cat to the to the bottom here uh and I can pick my location to be right on the joists on three locations at least anyway which is good what we need to know is in order to install this bad boy we got to design a handrail now that's 34. the Caps go in there three quarters of an inch so that makes it 32 and a half of actual space I'm going to put a 2x4 like this top and bottom so that's 32 and a half for seven is 39 and a half I'm gonna have a 2x4 across the top on the flat makes a 41 and I'm going to have one inch of space on the bottom that makes it 42. and because I'm using these I need 43 and I like to have an inch between the cap and the handrail so make we'll cut the post 44. boom done huh so I'm going to just cut a couple 44s we need three pieces of lumber uh let's go not too close to the house I'm going to be able to put a cap on that later that will clear just fine three pieces of lumber and we'll go forward a little bit here I think that makes it 37 yeah 37 inches that sounds like fun Okay so let me just get all this cut two at 44 3 at 37. piece of cake here we go foreign we need a measuring tape here my pencil now you want to have a spindle every four inches so you can take a quick look from the end and go okay well let's assume we start at four four times that one is still a four now that's a five inch hole problem with that is this is attached to the house it's higher than two feet off the ground it has to meet code for the handrail I can't have that big of a hole or some little young kid with the pointy head is going to stick his head through that hole get stuck fall off the side break his neck and I get sued so what we're gonna do that's why I went to 37 because it's more educational we're gonna go 36 is 18 and half is my Center so here's my Center Line all right we're going to drill there and we're going to take a look at what every four inches looks like here 16 is my last one and then it'll be the same gap on the other side okay that works really nice so there's my spot right there I believe right 16. so for eight twelve the reason you want to use the square to mark this off is I've already made these ends the same size and they're flush and by using the square I'm going to drill in the same location that'll keep all my spindles straight up and down when I'm all done I'll take out my sander get rid of my pencil lines clean up all my edges get rid of all of my stray hairs we call it well I don't know if it's a Wii but it's definitely I mean I call it the Hair Cedar has a tendency to do that especially when the saw Blade's been working a while starts to get a little Fray okay here we go now we also have one and a half inch Lumber we want to have everything in the center that's a three quarters that's this line right here there that's easier to do okay that'll be a lot easier to see so we're just going to start down here and hold it I'm cutting it on anyway let's just go like this okay I don't know exactly where the forstner bit goes now if you're not familiar with a forstner bit that's what these are they're basically flat bottom holes almost and that's a Ryobi kit it has a bunch of sizes and has a pointy tip so it's not a true forstner but for anybody at home that kit was only 30 bucks and they don't have the exact size for these spindles that you buy off the shelf at Home Depot because those spindles come with a little rubbery type kind of plastic cap so the challenge here is this you have the option to buy the pressure treated rails at the Home Depot pre-drilled they're not always in stock and more and more nowadays you've got to learn how to do everything yourself from scratch so that's why we're doing this um they don't make them in the Cedar they used two years ago when you know Supply wasn't an issue but now it's like why would I cut boards and stick it there and maybe no one will buy it so now I'm going to drill all this now I need to do something so I can mark the end of my flat part of the bit three quarters and for good measure I'm going to cut to one inch deep just because things move over time and when you're installing you want to have a little flexibility okay it's okay if the hole is a little bit bigger um if I go a quarter deeper it means it's only in the top a half an inch that's plenty to make a function it just makes it easier to install and now I stick the tip of that little bit right there on the on the line in the middle of my black hole and drill [Music] until my black line is at the edge now you could use painters tape or any other kind of tape I have no tape on me today so that's why I'm going gangster and using marker on the bit yeah I know just a quick tip if you're doing a series of rails around the house and they're all different measurements do yourself a favor always measure from the center unless you get the rail right up at the edge if you measure that then you can go left to right or right to left whatever but almost always starting in the center is going to give you the most professional look to have the same Gap each end of each rail section which by code have to be only five feet or smaller it's real obvious to anybody who walks in the room if you took the time to use a measuring tape [Music] okay I just got a sand foreign [Music] this one here has got a couple of little splits in it but that's okay I got a two by four and two by four in cap and 2x4 and I'm gonna have it facing in towards the rest of the stuff so that's good and it'll get attached to this wow that was easy and then we use these screws here now this gets believe this or not I'm going to show you four in the bottom okay and then four Around The Edge and then when it's time to screw it down to the deck we screw through the outside corners okay so first you attach it to the you remember here and I'm going to do it this way because I like to remind myself which way it's facing now because this is soft wood Lumber there's no need to pre-drill all right just uh just set it up and go one word of advice get a brand new Phillips number two bit if it starts to strip like this you're in trouble because this is soft metal it's uh Hardware from China like I've always said they make the worst screws in the planet you got the softest Steel foreign so you got to be real careful it's not a disc it's just a fact if anybody is offended with the fact that Chinese still sucks I'm not gonna apologize they knew it when they made it they made it to be cost effective not strong oh neighbors cooking again oh yeah yeah I wonder if they want to adopt another son is that my split yep there we go one down one to go the screws that they're using to mount to the deck are actually they require a half inch drive you might want to go out and get yourself a little set these little sockets most structural components out there require some sort of a six-sided head so I bought a set has a half it has a 7 16 has three quarter I think that's it just all the majors okay we'll get to that in a minute and I know you said you know you don't have to pre-drill every once in a while [Music] you come across a piece of this that's a knot and if you get a knot you can either pre-drill or just leave it alone we're talking about eight screws to secure the base if one of them can't go in for whatever reason it's not going to be the end of the world and something like that oh well okay boom boom boom this nasty split is courtesy of Home Depot huh climate controlled storage means that stuff really dries out we're gonna go back here I do not need to do any more work here so I'm going to switch over I'm going to Anchor this post and I'm going to put my first rail in and then we'll go from there now in this environment it wouldn't hurt to pre-drill again the cedar boards here we want something that's the same size as the shaft boom okay and we have one and three quarters I always check I don't know why I know what it is there we go that's as far out as I can go as long as this Gap is less than four inches you're fine I'm gonna try to make it somewhat Square here okay it's all in the details if you build everything Square then everything lines up for instance we have a 2x4 here it's going to go across the top but what happens if this is installed with a bit of a twist and that one isn't at that end so it's nice and closed and square there and over here you got an open Gap well the kind of workmanship where you're really going to get in trouble so I also have to consider the fact that the wood in most cases is going to be um Twisted in a lot of cases so here's the secret are you serious what am I doing here oh my wrong hole trying to put that in as if the pre-drill but that was actually a screw okay I'm only going to put one screw in one corner right now all right I'm going to set this one up same thing one of the outside corners allows these to all rotate in place then I'm going to build all of this and then I'm going to set the rest of the screws okay just a little bit of voodoo goes a long way here guys setting up one and three quarters again off the edge two inches off the front pre-drill [Music] and we're going to put this on a bit of an angle I want my screw angled this way and that way so I'm going to hold it promote here now let's build we're going to build on these blocks these are one inch perfect spacer set it and forget it boom for cut to count for the height of these bad boys I only gave myself one inch clearance and then I gave myself another inch another two inches just in case I'm an idiot and I am two inches to the cap and that's only one and a half so I have half inch to spare I dodged a bullet there that was not on purpose that was just me knowing that I do dumb stuff so I gave myself an extra two inches on the post because I'd rather have higher posts for no particular reason and then cut them down if I find them looking so stupid then to cut a 45 dollar piece of cedar and two pieces and be a half an inch short that would be really maddening these things come with special brackets you know and you can use them but again these black screws they strip super easy now the Robertson this time around set of Phelps which is a miracle but basically all it is is you stick these to the end of the and then you stick them in and you gotta take into account the measurement here so it gets a little bit bloody ridiculous doesn't it um I'm not going to use it I'm just going to go old-fashioned I find it's just too many too many pieces of black and I'm going to get Cedar deck screws alrighty rules for decking when you're doing a railing like this you got to do two things you got to attach it you got to keep it from moving over time okay really hard to screw in an angle start up top put in a hole put in reverse and then while it's spinning backwards change your angle now you've burned the entry angle look at that ready to roll perfect every time [Music] perfect every time now this looks like it might be a root of a pain in the butt right my son Nate taught me this trick I had them doing all the spindles on a job one day well I may not work with this but yeah it won't work with this sorry Nate your trick will not work because I'm not using the rubber stops let's just try to line it all up and see if we can get lucky what he does is he twists and lifts it up a little bit into the hole there we go here we go I almost got them all oh shoot yes okay now the only thing left to do is make sure that it's level because the holes can be inconsistent so I'm just going to measure this off one end I am 32 and a half the other end I am 32 and three quarters we're gonna see if we can drop this down a bit hair that'll be the same nice 32 and a half 32 and a half [Music] all right okay so we're gonna make sure that we are perfectly somewhat squarish we'll do the same thing to these ends here [Music] Okay so I like where everything is laying my gaps are healthy [Music] nice well that's got to be just as good if not better than the last one at least it's not ugly you got the little tiny set screws here wow that just made a thing if you're not handsome be lucky that looks a little sloppy with that big fat head on it maybe we'll have to switch it out to something not so obnoxious but anyway it's five bucks listen if you don't cap your posts what happens is is the water sits there and then it starts to eat through the grain that's exposed and then it just goes nothing but splits okay so do yourself a favor always cap your posts like everyone else in the neighborhood oh yeah they didn't wow enjoy putting that new fence up in 10 years hey yay basically what I'm using here is a couple left over five quarter boards remember whenever you order a large amount of wood for a project like this you're going to have a few that just really aren't desirable and that's fine usually they have a warp or a bent now it's time to cut them in half okay so we can use that wood as our support under the nosy and then we can add lattice underneath after that all right I'll show you as I build but let's just walk through this I have to adjust my blade height whenever you're ripping long pieces of wood it's it's hard to work with a table saw especially with wet Lumber the blade just gets killed instantly these little thin blades from Diablo work really well on wet wood so I recommend using a skill saw I'm going to just take that adjust my plate just a little bit higher off the wood so I'm going to cut clean through all right and I'm actually cutting into a piece of pressure treated lumber so it's going to act like my table today and I'm just going to rip rip rip and I throw one screw at the other end I'm good to go so here we are time to rip so the board is five and a quarter and so we're looking at cutting at around the two and three quarter Mark all right now in this situation one piece goes at the top and the other piece actually goes at the very bottom of the skirting to protect the lattice from damage so I'm not too concerned about being right on the money it's more about being consistent so there's two and a half there's two and three quarters what I'm going to do is use my finger on my plate up against the cedar as my guide and helps if I plug it in there we go that's more like it now I'm going to pull this forward just to get started here we go now I've got top and bottom what we're going to do is take the first board put the cut side up right up underneath the nosing all right now it's next to impossible to do this on your own all right so what I'm going to suggest get an extra pair of hands going I'm gonna throw an extra screw right there set the wood on it okay now come to the other end and this ah start off right flush here we go okay we'll just put a screw every two feet will be fine oh it's the wrong kind of screw of course whenever you're working outside make sure you're using acq screws means it's rated for contact with cedar and pressure treated lumber indoor screws will rest [Music] now we want to measure for our lattice and we don't want to go all the way to the ground now if you are in a three season climate you don't really get a winner then you can feel free to measure right to the ground you'll be fine if you don't get Frost but in a Four Season climate we have almost two inches of Gap here we have that for a reason we're going to maintain it and then when we're all said and done that two inch Gap is going to protect us from the ground freezing and potentially lifting the skirt before anything else does mostly because in that corner the sun will come into that back corner and it'll melt the snow and then it'll freeze again and we can get a freeze thaw cycle even if it's minus well five which is 20 degrees in the states okay so that freeze thoughts I can wreak havoc with my deck so that's why I got to make sure I maintain a gap here we go so I got almost 18 so I'll go 16. and then it's four feet I'm gonna measure off 16 17. with that kind of slope at eight feet long of course it's here that's where the board is 16 17 18. that's very consistent all right so now we're going to cut the lettuce which is not very easy I'm going to show you some secrets so here's my system I always have a couple extra two by fours laying around okay what I want to do is make that square we're going to call that the top of the lattice and measure down so that my 16 is in the middle of this board at the other end my 18 is going to be in the middle of the board okay that's how easy this is oh yeah now what I'm looking for we're really careful we take a look at the staple placement so the middle of my board is right here and that's 16. let's measure that off and put a mark it's not very visible but it's close to these staples and if I was to measure 17 and around the halfway mark you're going to see that at some point I'm going to be cutting through a stable and this is where it gets tricky cutting through the Staples is brutal so what I want to do is remember that since I'm using that that bottom two inches of wood I'm going to throw a chalk line on but when I'm cutting I'm going to be careful that every time I get close to a staple I'm going to adjust up or down a half an inch and finish my cut away from the Staples one it's hard on the blade but two that damage usually ends up resulting in tears in the wood okay so we're going to take a really simple here I'm going to get my chalk line and throw my measurement on and then we'll get started okay yep you can do this alone here we go get the string tight lay it on the line lift and snap now I can identify where I'm cutting and where I'm going to have a problem so in advance of cutting here's what I'm going to do I'm going to cut straight here to about this point okay so I'll be short and then I'm going to go a little bit long here and then I'll pick up the chalk around here all right it's good to have a plan know the end from the beginning and then something like this is quite easy you put the blade on our wood and we try to get this down where it makes a little bit of sense here we go I'm going to walk along here like on my knees basically and reach over and do the cutting but like I said I'm going to avoid the Staples finish through jump cut let's get this done not bad I do say so myself all right let's go install it now this is a much more manageable piece so I am going to start off at the end you realize I still have like three inches of meat available here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to find a location that I can run a screw that isn't anywhere near a staple all right and then we're just going to lift it up this is really delicate material all right other options you can use instead of camo screws here honestly um galvanized crown staples Benjamin basically the same product that they use to put this together okay we can use the same thing you can use a crown stapler I don't mind using these screws just because they kind of pre-drill but if you're going to use any other kind of wood screw to put this in you're going to want to pre-drill the hole [Music] it's just so skinny it splits so easy here we go all right one for down here somewhere here's a good spot so now do the same thing with that lattice from the other side okay we'll cut from a straight line again and then measure down to our three locations now here's the secret sauce right we put the other half of that down and it's not designed to close the gap completely it's designed to get close okay so here same thing this one's a lot closer to the actual location so I'm going to let that be my third my extra pair of hands and I'm going to start over here and lift it off the ground ah now I intentionally left a little more Gap here just because I know the nature of the freestyle and the way the sun works there we go Okay so it won't be an issue at this end of the house so we can lift it up a little bit more that's it guys that adds an incredible amount of durability to this all right then what we do is we finish off with some Decorative Stone not going to see that in this video but when the Project's completely done we're going to add another step in another video we're going to do the Decorative Stone we'll get there make sure you're subscribe one more little step to finish this off we want to add the same level of protection on all four sides so I've got to put in a top and bottom piece there I want to do one where the joint is and it'll never line up so by adding that that width it gives that illusion that everything's fine one more at the other end and then all that's left for me to do is to add the skirt underneath the landing same thing here we go let's set the depth of the blade and then a little bit more Mark offer two and a half here it's got our measurements Thomas seven eighths Never Gonna remember that much detail my age rule number one when you're measuring materials always write it down always oh phone's always going to ring just as you're about to cut and then you're going to forget what you're doing and make things fast measure from both ends get two different pieces at the same time and then the one in the middle 16 and three quarters foreign another time all right 49 249 eh okay I mean at least 16. 2049. there it is got that set up actually you know what we're only going 48 on that deck because that's how wide the lattice is I'm going to take an inch off of this okay so The Landing in total is 49 to the point we're going to go 48 we'll stop a little bit shy and that'll be fine um my plan here and that's just being smart with materials right my sheets are four by eight so I can cut the height of that and I can get both sides of this Landing with half a sheet if I'm smart depending on how tall this is yeah I'm gonna go like 18. 19 here 19 and 21. the approach here I know this one goes right to the ground is to add extra stability it doesn't get any direct sun so I don't have a free slot issue the same in the wintertime I've also got it set up so that it's floating in the middle it's attached on the left side and it's sitting on the ground here so it's no different than the platform with the stairs that were here before they're on the ground in the winter if this freezes and I get a bit of frost lift that's fine everything here can move on the Saddle Again in the spring so I'm going to go a little closer to the ground just to get the right look this time now with all that jogging I forgot my number 19. 21 I think yep good by four feet nice and easy first step is to cut this at four feet nineteen and twenty one here we go I've already checked the other side of the landing is not as uh not as far to the ground so whatever my left over here is 19 and 21 but I'm at four feet there's my 48. okay we'll go 19 from here [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we go okay we're gonna put it behind this board this time compress it all in there largely because I've only got two locations to screw into that gives me a little room remember we're doing the gas work so we're splitting this one goes to the barbecue one's going to the fire pit we still have to do a little bit of work underneath here to connect the pipe and that's fine I got my pipes my fittings and my string here just waiting for my gas guy to get back from vacation it should be later this week so then we'll be able to formulate an actual plan which would be nice but for now at least this is all done so I'll close this little corner up later now it's time to clean the deck off of all the materials get the barbecue the other side of the property yes because otherwise it'll be trapped because we're going to build the fence time to jump into the privacy fence so real quick story before we get into this product and why I bought it um you know usually I go to Home Depot that's my store but when it comes to these Boutique items right like systems Lowe's in Home Depot they've got different brands different competitors different options so I went to Home Depot and I saw the display black aluminum with wood I was like Yay inventory was brutal I had to call around the city to find out who had the right posts I went and got all the kit it's exhausted I just dropped it off the other day I opened one of them up and I was like really disappointed because there's a square post so that means every piece of wood I put on there I'd have to screw a bracket into the wood and then into the post I'm like that's a hell of a lot of work I know somebody's done something better than that so I went to Lowe's no I'm not sponsored but look at this here's a close-up of the aluminum and it has a u-channel okay and the wood slides in and it comes with these clips that have teeth and it digs into the wood and then the next piece wood digs into that piece of wood creates the spacer perfect every time it's idiot proof and I need that kind of help right so they have posts for the ends for the outside corners inside Corners if you're just going to continue to fence along W channel so I was like Hallelujah yes turns out this is the deal when we first started this video series we said we got a quote 5600 for the fence and I said nah we'll do a deck we'll throw a privacy screen on it let me look around this is all Cedar right I spent 50 or 600 bucks to get this far so having said that yeah I'm a little over budget but that's not in the end of the world my lattice was 200 bucks this privacy fence is going to be 800 for the metal post because I've got one section there and I've got three sections down here that's a lot of posts and then 800 for the wood which I bought a bunch of one by one by ten Cedar the five quarter board which means it's designed to fit in this space because this fence is designed for the five quarter board or like Trex if you want to do something like that if you've got a beautiful backyard with Trex and you want to bring it up for a privacy wall you can do that with this product all right it has all the hardware the base covers the plates the screws everything so yay much better option about the same price as those other metal posts anyway so I think I only I only spent another 150 bucks Matt more than Home Depot so the hell with it we're going with this so cheers for someone carrying a solution in stock even like when do you get a solution to a problem in stock nowadays that just doesn't happen let me start with uh this is two ends okay here we'll just open this up and I have the other box there here's the product all right this is the the u channel that goes in the middle okay so you have to get the right box and they have different heights great great I mean like as far as an in stock solution go gotta love it now right out of the gate and I have not used this kind of a system yet I'm excited ah it marks the bottom which is good because probably has machine screws with a plate that gets attached right um this is not Packaging this is not just for shipping okay leave this on until after you're done installing until after you're done staining huh especially if you're gonna do it like we do this can actually be a protective coated okay so that you can you can well I'm going to actually take a knife and slice it up a little bit but I want to be able to set everything up and then just spray it I got a stain that it's a water base I'm going to put a pump bucket I'm going to spray it so I'm going to clean all this up here real quick so that I can just do my thing this is the dullest knife in history this is the one that I've got off you you cleaned up the thing on the ground right okay that's what I'm looking to do I'm going to get a new blade this isn't gonna work we're just going to trim it back so that when we we're done we can actually spray this and then take the plastic off afterwards okay piece of cake we're gonna get set up we're gonna set up our posts get our Hardware installed line everything up beautiful I need one of those over there only one of these over here top and bottom which what I don't know now why isn't this one marked up and bottom oh there it is machine screws maybe it's Universal Yep this one's Universal no it's not that's not machine threaded there we go make sure you check these holes are machine drilled okay so that the plate can be attached this location this location got it and then afterwards you can screw through the front so make sure we line up the tops and bottoms we'll cut back the extra plastic we'll get our decorative caps and our Hardware out [Music] If this job site organized that's the next one for the middle maybe this plate will be better yeah that's exactly what I'm talking about okay that post is ready nice it was down there ah but now on the other things you need for this job take two minutes to read the instructions grab a chop saw on a stand everybody out there who's in the DIY space who's using a chop saw in the grass just a word of warning guys um it's actually incredibly dangerous it's so easy to lose your balance or if somebody bumps you from behind put it up on a stand then it'll save your back and it'll make it a lot safer you won't accidentally get thrust into the blade while it's moving I know I'm not much for safety but sometimes once you've seen an accident it will change your mind about how you're doing things [Music] it's aluminum anyway so even if I scratch the aluminum it doesn't rust okay important blah blah blah okay don't return product to store you gotta love it when company says that um maximum six feet and then the top one goes in and screws of the board this will help keep the fence steady and simple that's what that is good all right now we understand how to use this stuff that wasn't that tricky one two three four five six there it is let's see if we can get these on the timer here okay all right ready I don't even know if this is the right size for this yeah just a word of warning whenever you're working with things that are machine like this do them as much as you can with your fingers all four of them before you pull it out these kind of drivers if anything is mildly off in the manufacturing process once you get the first screw in a plate nice and tight everything else is going to be shifted and adjusted you'll never be able to get the other one lined up now we got it going we're going to tighten it up real good all righty then okay now placement of these posts is very important remember I um I have overhang I have a one inch here of just regular wood so and I have a two inch overhang here so we want to try to make this intentional one and three quarters one and three quarters good happy with that I'm going to use these pieces of Hardware here now these are not normal screws um I had leftovers I'm going to actually show you the package when Matt gets back he went shopping to get more for me of all the hardware that came in that package they didn't have mounting screws but these are perfect it's actually part of the structural screw system for the overhead decorative metal brackets the black powder coated black brackets so I know that they're going to be more than enough for this again the secret is going to be to pre-drill so I'm going to set up for pre-drilling and then we can get this mounted all right now because we're drilling into structural Lumber I'm not going to pre-drill three inches just want to pre-drill get past the cedar surface so that nothing splits on me so I'm looking at about an inch I have no idea exactly how Square this is going to be so [Music] that is what we're going to do we're going to put in two for now then I'll put in the next pose and then we'll start installing the wood we'll get everything detailed later and add the last two screws later okay and I'm not even drilling this all the way in just enough that I can get this thing built now that's good for all my Hardware I have 10 foot boards I'm going to go with five foot sections and then this is more of a four and the last section there's gonna be a little over five so that's fine I'm going to show you how I'm going to set up my saw right now because I'm going to cut all my wood in advance and then just this is just assembly work so the secret here is to have a SAW stand and set up what's called the saw stop okay that's the limitation to the material so now I can measure that's my five foot mark let's see if this wood is just a little longer yes it's five and a quarter good this saw can slide on my on my table here okay so what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna slide my table until it's the perfect spot that I went looking for and then I'm going to lock it in okay now every time I put wood on this side it's going to finish in five feet that's a little sloppy I'm going to lift this up just a little bit more there that's better I figured it would have a difference here all right here we go now that's one foot for the first section that's awesome these are six and a half foot posts let's go with a half inch Gap makes that actual six 12 is six feet we'll cut 12 boards in half and then we'll start from there that's a dumb spot for it see if everything is working out okay no foreign so we are going to add these stops boom we just set a spacer for how high our wood goes loving that we'll do the same with this done now we're going to use the first piece of wood in order to establish where this post goes I wasn't going to do it but I'm thinking I'm not liking the furry ends I'm going to see it through the gaps so quality first better get out the palm sander and clean these ends up all right so here I am thinking oh last day we'll just get her done but I don't know I probably spent at least an hour and a half or two hours sanding all the edges of my cut so far not gonna stop now all right [Laughter] okay now we can do it there we go so now really the only question left is how much Mercy do I want right because there's no mercy there right now but I throw in a quarter and these gaps are actually pretty consistently it's got to be three well they're 5 8 Gap so that's pretty heavy so I'm going to throw in a quarter inch Gap Mercy for Aesthetics one and three quarters off the back we'll keep that consistent three quarter Gap to there checking all your line of sights because you have curved wood and weird stuff going on that looks relatively Square I'm gonna throw two screws here pilot hole just get that first inch I'll drive the other two and that'll be enough to keep this in place until Matt gets back meantime I'm going to finish building the rest of this and show you how it's done okay wow loving it so here are the spacers perfect the trick is they slide in everything is going to slide in these grooves okay look at that it actually it's gonna hide the ends so I won't see any of my ends maybe I can cheat now you'll notice there's a little bit of room left to right here most of the wind that I get comes from this side so I'm going to intentionally try to push my wood back when I set my spacers and there's got to be an easier way I think I'm going to get a hammer and a wooden block I'm going to put the next piece in I'll drop give it a little love tap all right so I don't need a I don't need to worry about that so we'll go gentle for now make sure that I'm splitting up that Gap push it to the back of the rail set it in oh everything in life was this easy eh there we go I know I paid a little bit for the materials but honestly this install oh making up for it okay last thing I want to check is how wide it is at the top versus the bottom I don't want to start getting too comfortable I got this 58 and an eighth oh it's actually tighter at the top right now good I want to apologize right now for everybody who's watching this video who's expecting to see all kinds of great carpentry tricks today Sometimes the best trick is to just buy a product that makes your life easy right it's by working hard no as we're working smart not hard right here we go well that's about as consistent as you're ever going to get okay so I'm just gonna do this exactly until the very end wow all of a sudden there are people out there all over the country watching this going I can't believe how much I paid my Carpenter to do that if you're looking for a gig economy business to get into you can build a small deck in a day and you can do a privacy fence like this in an afternoon the next day that's something to consider what's this this is one hell of a way to make a living I have extras anyway that's still not going to fit still doesn't fit okay so it's unanimous um one vote and I made it alternating spaces of five and a half inch deck boards with a half inch space leaves me with this little bit of height left over I'm not sure what everybody's thinking about but I'm just going with double space or double spacer gonna do it consistently across the board that allows me to put my decorative cap on to me it's a win if you have a different idea or if you think it would be better to to stop with this last board here and just not have that space interesting point is I'm five ten and a half I don't know why I count to half five eleven in shoes Matt's a little over six foot so with this board gone he's looking right over the top of that as he's walking around so a lot of tall people in my family so we're gonna opt to add the extra height so we actually have the Privacy we're paying for here it makes sense let me know in the comment section if you have a different opinion [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] so you can see basically what happened here is we we were just following a one space per board nice and simple just like it is in the picture on the package but what happened is when we're using Cedar we get to the top and the wood was too high to put the decorative cap on I was like well that was kind of stupid so it became an issue it was going to be higher than the aluminum itself about a half an inch higher so we took it apart and came back and we went with a double stack system so double stack spacer double stack and then that gives us a place where the the cap can go on not really a big issue I guess it's just the uh it'd be nice if it was more consistent but if I took the extra board off and added all the other spacers this board only comes up to this high and that's not as much privacy as we want back here so we we do we do just a real warning if you're going to go this tall and do the spacing system while you're at the store buying your package buy an extra package of spacers they don't give you any more than what's necessary to get the boards at this height okay step one of course is to give all of your deck boards and surfaces a light sanding the reason for this is when they cut the wood at the Mill it's a rough surface and they make it clean by using a planing machine and it leaves a little bit of a glaze on the wood and if you don't get rid of that glaze and scuff it up a little bit it won't receive the stain properly you can end up with a really weak finish so quick light sanding 220 orbital sander just past the surface that's all it is and then we're going to go to the next step [Music] foreign Next Step and I know you don't have to use a lot of brusher we're wetting the wood okay unless it needs to be washed and scrubbed we're just getting it a good soak just before we put on our treatment and the idea here is when now that we've sanded it we want we want to open up the pores to receive the stain and it's a hot day this is a little dirty we just finished installing this privacy screen and if you haven't seen that video I'll put a link in the video description for you this is a game changer 20 feet of fence between you and your neighbors for 1600 bucks and you can install it yourself it was really easy [Music] we're getting ready you're doing Surface Prep for a stain job the stain lasts a long time so you got to make sure that you wash it scrub it wash it scrub it again if you need to I don't care if you spend three weeks watching scrubbing don't stain it until it's ready until you're completely satisfied it couldn't be in any better condition because this is the only shot that you get I'm making sure that you're not going to get a little white line from a piece of grass that was laying there right or you're gonna have dirt showing up and it gets compounded and magnified when the stain hits so just do your best don't be satisfied with Footprints scrub scrub scrub scrub scrub you'll be surprised to stand you find a wood sometimes it's just a matter of somebody at the lumber you're ever sitting down having lunch and Spilled their drink [Music] here we go so here's my stain rig I got my can my CO2 guard this is the product we're using it is a two application penetrating sealer with UV protection mixed in and you got to continually mix where as you're working with it okay now so I took two cans I poured most of the contents in the pail kept a couple inches in there used a paint mixer to stir up the gummy stuff on the bottom put it all together mix it again it is a mixture so as it sits it starts to separate I'll take the deck brush handle here we got two application techniques we're going to go through real quick one this brush and we're going to use this because we have control and it's gonna be more like a painting process we'll go through that in a second once the painting is done I've got the same product split into this can here now this is a scotch canisters designed for weed control adding garden grow and all that kind of jazz but it has a cool tip here it's got three functions so I'm using a fan function okay and I'm going to be applying the stain on all of my boards with this right and then I'm going to take the handle off of this brush thread the handle from my scrub brush on here and I'm going to use this because these bristles will act as a how should it's just some pressure to help push that product into the wood all right it is a hot day today so I'm using that pressure is very important and you want to make sure that every about every three minutes you go back and you recover what you just did so you got to be careful you don't do too much flooring and then you're kind of walking on it right that's a problem and remember this stuff does not skin it does not stay on the surface of the wood it penetrates into the wood so let's say three five years from now we come back out in the spring it's like yeah it's a little dull we'll get another can we'll mix it up and we'll just we'll just spray the whole Deck Down it'll take 20 minutes walk away let it dry and you're good for another five years what a deal looks like it's almost dry we're going to head over there and start brushing and we're going to show you our system here so this stain it's it's really watery all right bring it over with the brush apply it in okay now this brush is designed to be as wide as the board all right get the excess off with gentle pressure all right there we go that's stained if you have more control just press the brush on the side get a little extra content out of there that's it I'm only going to do top of the bench obvious reasons we're going to demonstrate how to use that spray system now the reason I use the cardboard is because I don't want to get drips on another piece of wood that I'm not going to be staining for a little while okay so here we go now if you've got an old deck and you've got existing stain or paint and you can't just apply this on top almost every other product on the market is not a penetrating sealer you're going to run into all kinds of trouble well there's the top let's see if we can do the rest of this bench ah with the canister that's not bad all right I'm gonna hold up for a second because I want to brush all that in make sure that it penetrates wow I just made that real easy all right well there we have it folks that is a that's a gentle kind of pressure on that wand it's not putting too much product on there at once I'm just going to rub it in nice and even there we go that's how you add the pressure here's the application to see if there's more product going on there than it looks like but it gives you a really nice range of control here that looks pretty darn good actually give a little bit of brush work a good penetration on this well I'm not happy there a little bit more product wow if this isn't the easiest looking stain job you've ever done in your life I don't know what it is but this is awesome I need a little more product over here bright sun right okay and that's her that's our three minute mark so now I'm gonna do this all over again [Music] so if you're amazed at this product right now like I am you're going to be asking yourself where do I get it the answer is not Home Depot C2 guard is an exclusive formula for the C2 paint stores and this is a uh it's a co-op all over North America now we've made an available a special discount for you guys you can get the stuff delivered to your house in the United States 20 off okay if you're in Canada go to the website look for a store near you in Ottawa all of my friends from Ottawa go to Randall's paints on Bank Street all right hello hook yep ask for Mark tell him Jeff sent you so now you can see why when we built this privacy fence we left the plastic on the aluminum and we're all done we'll just remove the plastic problem solve right consider five years from now all you do is throw some painters tape on your aluminum off you go to the races well there you have it guys you can pay someone fifty six hundred dollars to build you a fence or you can DIY an entire deck for six thousand and a little bit of Blood Sweat and Tears fire pit and gazebo were extras and if you want to see how I built those you can click the link right here [Music]

Channel: Home RenoVision DIY

Views: 3,076,585

Keywords: jeff thorman, homerenovisiondiy, how to stain a deck, how to seal a deck, how to prepare a deck for staining, how to stain a deck with a paint sprayer, fence, privacy fence, home renovision diy deck, how to build a fence on a deck, save money, how to build a deck, deck framing, build a deck for beginners, how to build a ground level deck, how to build a floating deck, how to build a ground level deck frame, how to build a ground level deck without digging

Id: hn5HnhSiuSs

Length: 214min 25sec (12865 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023