You face the bottom of the stairs as you approach the deck from the house. The stairs are a little steep and narrow. They force you to look down,
rather than up at the view, as you walk up.

When you get to the top of the stairs, you look up and out to the view. As many times as I’ve been on the deck, this always comes as a surprise. No photo seems to do the view justice.

When you turn around, you are in another outdoor room. This room is defined by the rails, posts and curving awnings.

View looking down into our garden from the second floor. When you are on the first floor, you are within the garden. You are surrounded by the plants, shades and trees overhead. When you are on the second floor, you have views out for miles. It feels like you have broken through the surface of the ocean and can see out. Looking down from the deck, the plants on the deck, the shades and the plants on the ground form a sea
of green.

Photos of some details. The corner is also shown as a detail drawing in Part 2: CD’s.

Sunsets from the deck are terrific.

When you build something, particularly a deck where everything is exposed, you want a good builder. We got the best, Jack Murphy, all around carpenter, builder and nice guy. He prefers to work alone and built the entire deck by himself. He did a great job.

The deck has my preferred kind of construction and detailing: chunky wood, big bolts, overlapping beams, few of the ubiquitous sheet metal connectors. I used galvanized wire mesh for the handrails. It has a nice open look and provides plenty of opportunities to hang plants. I came up with the design of the awnings without talking to an awning manufacturer. In some ways this was good, because they don’t recommend loose awnings that can move in the wind. We love the double curve shape, and repeated it on our garden shades (see previous posts). They do move around a little on very windy days.

The first floor feels like a woodsy study, a study with 100’s of plants. The posts, beams and braces create a very warm and intimate, sheltered space.

Photos from the top:

First view of the deck when you walk down our driveway. The  front side was kept flat because it was close to our sycamore trees. The deck cantilevers out on the other 2 sides for a larger second floor.

View from our back door.

View of the first floor room from the back of the deck.

The sun shines through the deck at certain times of the day, creating patterns on the plants.

Various photographs of the different details: stair, corner, footing, beams and braces in center of deck

Construction drawings-from model to building


When you have a design worked out in detail, you need construction drawings (CD’s) to guide the builder. CD’s are a description of how the final building should be: materials, dimensions, connections… They do NOT describe the construction sequence to follow or how to make all the pieces to achieve the final result. That is where the skills of the builder come in.

The elevations (north and east) are pretty easy to read. The posts and beams are drawn the size they will actually be. They are thinner than in the model. I couldn’t cut the foam core thin enough to represent the actual size.

The enlarged detail cross section shows how some of the pieces go together. It is drawn larger to show more detail. CD’s use drawings at progressively bigger scales to show larger and larger detail of the critical areas where the different pieces come together.This section shows the beams at the top of the deck, the deck handrails, the decking and supporting beams.

The framing plan is a little confusing. It shows a plan view (looking down) of
the beams that support the second floor decking. Every beam is shown as a single line, the posts are shown as squares. The sizes of the posts, beams and connectors (nails,
hangers or bolts) are explained with notes.

These CD’s are blueline prints.
Although widely associated with architects and buildings, blueprints haven’t been widely used for about 50 years. They were replaced by blueline prints. Where a blueprint turned black lines into white lines on a deep blue background, bluelines have dark blue lines on a light blue background. Both prints were created by shining light through drawings on translucent paper, onto photo-sensitive paper. They have been replaced by inkjet prints of digital drawings, and xeroxes or scans of pencil drawings. These bluelines have aged a little, you can see some yellowing on the detail section and framing plan.