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So as some of my fellow workshoppers will know - I built my first home in 2016 and moved in early February this year.
It's modest block of land with a nice, affordable and maintainable 3 bedroom house on the block. Now being quite a small block the space provided for the backyard was never going to be incredibly ample, in fact it's rather small.
So at the outset I was provided the below plans which highlighted the size of the backyard and the "landscaping" that would be provided.
So the plans themselves made the space look somewhat decent - however the reality of this is that the garden is about 12m x 2.5m with a 1m wide concrete path going around the perimeter of the home.
It doesn't particuarly provide the greatest space for entertaining. And as you can see below the reality of this garden and the "landscaping" provided left a lot to the imagination.
Even the view from the living room doesn't particuarly scream "Come out and enjoy the outdoors!"
So it came time to start planning a way to rejig this space and transform it into a liveable space that I would enjoy spending time. My other concern was purely budgetary. As I'm currently in this home on a single income any transformation that occurred would purely be done the old fashioned D.I.Y. way. As such a lot of my loftier ideas were quickly nixed and my expectations became a bit more measured.
I do also have the access to a father who has built many a deck and pegola of his own in his time nad as a result my plans started to lean towards a nice decked area that wouldn't require a lot of maintenance and would transform the space into an entertaining space as an extension of the living room.
So the plan is to completely deck the backyard area and build up some nice large planter boxes to keep a bit of the green in the backyard and provide some bench seating of their own.
Visitors to this popular discussion might be interested to see pictures of @maknilsin's completed deck here.
This project has certainly been very popular with the Workshop community - over 7500 views to date.
Looking forward to your next update @maknilsin. Thanks again for sharing.
Jason
Well after a severe lack of updates - it's time to update the wonderful Workshop community on the progress on my backyard makeover. I'm happy to report that we are finally tools down on the project!
There are still a few little niggly jobs that I want to complete but what was once a meagre deck creation job has spanned into a 6 month project that transformed my backyard into my own personal beer garden. Some competing priorities at my sister's home renovation saw work on this project completed pretty sporadically.
So I think one of my previous updates, we had just started digging out the backyard and were levelling off the yard to start placing the joists. This was back in May....we most certainly didn't understand the extent of this task.
Levelling off the deck took forever, no matter how close we got to thinking we were done we would discover we needed to take off more. The below illustrates the area we had to work with
But once we got the space ready, we were able to crack on and start smashing through the creation of the deck. The joists were an utter joy to work with as we quickly realised how my entire block was hardly square. The project stalled significantly here, my old man I really wanted to make sure that the deck was perfectly level. So a lot of time and patience was spent on getting this right.
But after many weeks and frayed tempers - the deck started taking shape and we could see the end in sight.
With the deck finally laid out and completed it was finally time to think about the final touches. We had used quite a lot of treated pine sleepers throughout the backyard to help frame the space and build the planter boxes on each side of the deck. I however thought that these slightly clashed with the new deck and were also glaringingly not square with the deck due to slope of the block.
We had however estimated quite generously for this project and we had a lot of spare timber, so we set about cladding over every sleeper in the yard. I have to say I'm pretty happy with the result as it tied the whole space together nicely.
Melbourne Cup day was spent completing the cladding of the planter boxes. I foolishy requested that these boxes have some nice joinery, which easily added a days worth of work as two DIYers attempted to become carpenters. The result in pictures is fantastic, however up close some of our joins are less than ideal. I may come back to these planter boxes in the future, but for now I think the stain hides a lot of the imperfections.
And then finally to finish off the deck, we spent this last weekend staining the deck. This took a bit longer than we were expecting - when staining of 40m2 of deck you expect it to take some time. But being in direct sun we were racing the clock to get everything done in the early morning, otherwise the stain was drying up almost instantly. So after two days, both coats are down and the deck/beer garden is looking fantastic!
Hi @mydreams,
Welcome to Workshop. It's fantastic to have you join us. I hope you find plenty of inspiration for your projects from our community members, as well as great information and advice.
I'm sure @maknilsin will be happy to assist when he gets a chance. You might also find the How to build a deck series of D.I.Y. advice videos from Bunnings very useful. And as @BIM_Engineer recently posted, Chris is also very happy to assist if you would like to provide more information about your plans. You might like to start a new discussion and post as much detail as possible.
Thanks again for joining the discussion.
Jason
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