Placing the joists

Having returned the small and useless joist hangers and bought some decent ones at Wicks, it is time for a lot of hammering, each joist hanger has over a dozen nail holes. But this is were it starts to get really satisfying, very fast progress can be made. In principle with all the effort that has gone into keeping things level the joist hangers and joists can be nailed in place without rechecking the levels, and frankly I doubt there would have been a perceivable difference had I done that, but it takes little effort to check the level joist to joist and out to the posts, and the joist hangers can be hammered in just a little up or down accordingly. I don't think there was movement of more than a centimetre either way, over a 2.4m joist span this is a small fraction of a degree, pretty much as near perfectly level as you are likely to get. Where the joists were balanced on the sandwich boards a light weight "L" shaped bracket was used to keep the joists parallel. The bracket had little fixing strength, but sheer weight is all they need here.

As we work along placing joists, it is important to remember that decking boards are going to be laid, where one decking board ends and another begins. As our joists are two inches wide, this would leave 1" for fixing the end of each board to a joist. I am not planning on a fancy pattern to the decking board, just running them in parallel to the wall, with staggered lengths to avoid entire rows of joints. To give more room for the fixing, at points where joints will occur, I nail a second joist to the first. Maybe I should have used a little sealant here, but I did not, arguably the wood is tightly nailed together, and very little water will get down here, it is not like a wall where driving rain will see sheets of water washing down. Water also has a lot of surface tension, it is not that penetrate.

The joists only take a couple of days to complete, I am not commenting much on time scales here, as the work was all carried out whilst I was ostensibly working from home. So a good deal of the work was done on a "Whilst that program is compiling, I'll knock a few nails in" basis. This does not tell me or you very much about how long the job takes. In elapsed time, from the first digging to completion it was a couple of months, but the serious work was more like a few weeks, not exactly "Ground Force", but then I was working mostly alone and without half the tools they use, come to think of it, they might have had a rude shock with the engineering bricks and struggled to do this job in a couple of days!

As the joists expand, it is very gratifying to see people stopping in the street below to discuss and admire the work in progress, some visitors are clearly not just passing buy, they are making a specific trip to see the deck. In the following months there even appears to be a knock on effect with hard landscaping projects in the neighbouring streets, one can almost imagine the nagging in some of the houses, "if he can build that on his own, why can't you repair the wall?". Even Barry's scepticism has evaporated. What is emerging is big, level, and clearly won't fall down short of a nuclear strike.