Also the unofficial photographer did have to operate in a rather clandestine manner, whilst I shall be able to bring you a different (closer) perspective on the work in progress.
So I thought for this first blog I would go back to the start and provide some previously unseen "before" images.
As previously explained, the original deck was built just about 10 years ago in time for an earlier significant birthday party for Jane; however the builders did not understand the difference between porous membrane material and plastic sheeting and managed to place plastic sheeting between the original sub frame members and the deck boards (they might have got away with plastic sheeting if they had put this on the ground - to keep the weeds down - but they didn't); consequently when it rained, water collected beneath the deck boards (image a lake) and gradually rotted pretty much everything (over a period of about 8 years) until it started to show and then eventually people started to fall through !! At this point, having replaced quite a few boards, in the hope of saving the deck, we gave up on this approach and decided that the whole thing needed to be ripped out and rebuilt. And being a retired person with nothing much else to do, it seemed quite clear that I should do this myself rather than getting involved with another bunch of dodgy ne're do wells.
So, and without further ado, here are a few pictures of the beginning of the project or rather the "end of life" of the original deck.
You can see the original deck boards (painted white at some stage) which are well rotted from below; and also some of the replacement boards, that we installed about eighteen months ago.
Laying casually on the rotting deck is one of the small samples of deck boards we obtained to see what we thought we liked.
