Home Improvements: Part One

Well, since my wonderful hubby is back from his week long stay in Valle Crucis, NC without me (I'm not bitter, really), I think it's high time I posted some pictures of our home improvement projects. We started in May and our goal was to tear down an existing deck (if you can even call it that), build a screened in porch and new deck, and also put vinyl siding on the front of the house. My FIL, BIL, oldest nephew, and Jeff finished the siding last weekend. Jeff left a day later and I was left to paint shutters and our front door. I finished up on Wednesday so now our biggest outdoor projects are officially complete! In this post, I'll share the deck building project.

The first step was tearing down the existing back deck:

Next came the construction of a 12x16 screened in porch and a 10x20 uncovered deck. This project took about a month to fully complete since it was Jeff, his dad, and his brother who built it. You may remember that his brother has many health issues but the most serious is his kidney function, which is only 18%. How much we did each day depended on how he was feeling. Since he has experience building things like this, we relied heavily on his expertise and advice. He worked very hard to help us complete this project and we are very thankful for all he did to help us. My FIL also worked very hard, probably much harder than a 70-something year old man should. We are thankful for his help and his diligence in getting things done. This picture shows them putting down the flooring for the screened porch.

They built the uncovered portion next.

The next project was the roof for the screened porch. I'll skip the part about how the roof leaked and we thought we were going to have to tear it down until my super smart BIL came up with a solution!

Next, the walls for the screened porch went up, along with the railing for the uncovered portion.

We took a break and Jeff played us a tune.

We did several other things including putting up screen, a storm door, vinyl siding on the outside, lattice on the ceiling on the inside, lattice around the outside, lattice on the inside around the walls, put up a ceiling fan, built two sets of stairs to access the deck, and put down carpet on the screened porch. The end result was a beautiful 36ft. long deck that we are really enjoying. Here you'll see three views of the outside.

In this one, you can see how we put lattice around the inside walls, you can see the carpet we put down, and the furniture we bought for the area. We also attached lattice to the rafters on the ceiling but I didn't take pictures of that :-o)

 

We are so glad to be finished with this project. It was a huge project that kept things messy for a long time. However, it was so worth the wait!