Inspiration

Since moving into this house we had failed to make any practical use of the slope at the bottom of the garden. Even getting to the two paths on the slope was a little hazardous as it involved traversing a small section of unpathed slope with a manhole in the middle of it. Early in 2000 I had one of those eureka moments, why not create a deck on the slope? The thought in this case was almost instantly converted into certainty. We would gain access to an unused area of the garden, making it a whole lot larger since as you can see it is a pretty small garden to start with, and since the house is north facing, we would create an area which actually got some sun.

rarely has an idea seemed so right.

Initial Practicalities

It is all very well being inspired, but in the real world projects cost money. I won't pretend I was hard up at the time, I wasn't. But there were certainly plenty of other priorities taking chunks out of my income and having no savings at the time, it would have put a different completion on things if a loan was going to be needed to do the work.

As such the very first thing to do was to make some form of cost estimate. Exact costing at this stage was immaterial, I just needed to gauge the practicality of things. The deck had to be the width of the garden wide, about 12 meters, and whilst the outward length was up for grabs, it clearly had to be at least in the region of 6 foot (I measure in meters, but tend to think in feet!), anything less than 6 foot would not be a deck it would be a walkway. So the total surface area allowing for the "L" shape to the steps was going to be at least 25 square meters.

What does 25m² of timber cost? I didn't have a clue. So it was off to Wicks the local but pretty useless diy/building store. I don't buy much from there, as you just have to put up with queues and poor service., but they are on the whole cheaper than many places and hence a good place to start if you want to know some rough figures. This trip told me that I was looking at several hundreds of pounds for the basic decking. Obviously this was just part of the cost, but it did show that the scope of the cost was in the low thousands. It would make a dent in the credit cards, but we were not talking about a long term home loan or anything. There were no good excuses not to go ahead.

Well actually there were plenty of good excuses! I had never mixed concrete before, or even done basic carpentry at school, and this deck would be 5 or 6 feet off the ground. It was not a project that I could afford to do badly, then again it was also the middle of march and still cold and damp.