Cabin Deck Building

Hi everyone!

Well, this is the Monday of all Mondays for me.  I've been off playing for the last two months, building this!

I can't tell you how much we appreciate your patience with us over the last eight weeks, as our time has been consumed with our cabin project that we did for DIY Network.  We are so thrilled to have an opportunity to share what we do with you in a new way, and can't wait ourselves to see how the show comes out.  I'll be sharing as soon as I know when it airs - probably sometime this fall.

In the meantime, I'll be sharing with you on the blog how we built the cabin, and of course, all of the furniture and project tutorials.  

I had hoped to be able to blog at night after working on the cabin during the day, but given the extreme time schedule, caring for our children, and the challenge of getting someone to put their life on pause to help us with kids, all while camping - well, let's just say I didn't think that one through to well, and something had to give.  Forgive me, please. But now that we are done with the actual building, I'll be getting back to more regular blogging.  Thank you for not giving up on me.

We are very thankful that my sister was able to come out quite a bit and take care of Hayes for us.  Without her being able to help, when she could, I would have not been able to work at all on the construction site.  

After we got all the main walls framed up on the cabin, we all wanted to start throwing timbers up.  But with the cabin now so enclosed, we decided the more sensible decision would be to add the two side decks on first, giving us somewhere to work and move materials into the cabin.  

I had designed two decks on either side of the cabin, both running the full width of the cabin (24 feet) and eight feet in width.  We had decided against a deck in front because with the sloping lot, the front of the deck would be about twelve feet above the ground.  That, and I didn't want anything blocking the view of the main windows. 

This is a mountain cabin, with lots of snow, so we also decided that these decks should be covered.  We integrated the covered decks right into the timberframe design as well.

When we put in the main foundation for the cabin, we also poured concrete footings for the deck foundation.  On the cabin side, we applied ice and water shield to the plywood exterior of the cabin where the deck will connect to the cabin, and then took measurements for our ledger boards.

via Wood Magazine

For those of you that aren't deck builders, the ledger is the board that ties the deck into the structure.  

We attached the ledger boards directly to the cabin.  For now with just nails to hold it up (we'll go back later with some really big screws).

So once the ledger is in, we can start adding the joist brackets.

First, we marked the placement of all the joists. 

Using a big nailgun made attaching the brackets much faster.

We only attached the brackets on one side.  After the joist is dropped in, we will then secure the second side.

That's why the brackets look a little out in the above photo.  I promise, this story does have a happy ending.

So once we got all of the brackets on the ledger board, we are ready to move to the beam side of the deck.

Over the upright posts that come up from the concrete footings, we need to add a beam that spans the entire length of the deck, with the joists sitting on top of the beam.

To get the right width for our beams to fit in the upright brackets, we made our beams out of 2x boards (sized in width for our deck) with plywood sandwiched in between.  Kinda like you'd make a window header.

After cutting the upright beams off level, the beam we just made is screwed to brackets attached to the uprights.  We temporarily cross brace to keep the uprights square to the cabin.

Ready to start addin the joists that tie into the brackets on the ledger and over top of the beam!

​

The joists just drop right into the brackets, and sit directly on the beam.

We did have a little challenge though -

The joists that we had were pretty rough and in consistent in width, so we ended up having to notch a few of the ends down on some of the wider width boards.

It's always nice to just be able to grab your material and work with it, but there's always a work around when things aren't working out, and out here at the cabin site, its not like you an just run back to the store and get new boards.

Now that fits perfect, with the tops of the ledger and joist flush.

The brackets are then attached on the loose side to the ledger, and also the brackets are nailed to the joists.

Once the joists were all in, it really started looking like a deck!

We also added a few bigger beams in between the joists where the covered deck posts sit.

And toenailed the joists to the beams to keep them in place.

Finally, the rim joists are added to the sides and outside to finish the deck framing.  

And more screws are added to tie the ledger board into the floor framing of the cabin.

We've got two people working on the deck framing and it took a few hours to get to this point.  

My favorite part of any project is that point when you start putting the finishing layer on.  Whether that's the paint on a piece of furniture, the flooring over a subfloor, or the siding on, I just love getting to that stage.  Yay, we are ready for decking!

For these decks, I definitely didn't want to go with a composite, because I wanted to cabin to be rustic and full of natural materials.  So we opted for a Alaskan Cedar, harvested from southeastern Alaska.

Since there is alot of snow and dirt at the cabin site, we did a larger gap between the boards - 1/2" - hoping some of the mess falls through the cracks.

We used stainless steel outdoor deck screws for attaching the deck boards.  

Some of the boards were not as straight as we'd like, so we did have to wrestle with a few of them to keep the gaps consistent.  Having pieces of 1/2" plywood to use as spacers really helped guide us.

Along the wall, above the ledger board, we added metal flashing to help water drain off the cabin and over the ledger board.  The decking goes on top of the flashing.

Here's how the deck looks today -

Although I would have loved to start working on the timberframe sooner, it ended up being a good idea to do the decks first.  Throughout the building process, the decks were huge in having a flat level surface for working off of.

We'll get to that timberframe soon enough!

XO Ana + Family