Project Backyard: Upgrading Our Deck

This is my dog, Milo (he looks sad in this picture).  We've had Milo for nearly as long as we've lived in this house.  Aside from random acts of stupidity, he's actually a pretty good dog.  My only (well not the only, but the one I could actually remedy) complaint is that whenever it rains, he hides under the back deck and the results of this are usually one muddy puppy that tracks in dirt if I'm not paying attention.  Oftentimes I've had to take him in the front yard if it rains so that he won't hide under the deck.  But since we were finishing our basement I was hesitant in startin any other large projects while that was going on.  Since our basement is nearly complete, it was time to do something about mud-puppy.

This was our deck before we started.  It's open with a lot of dirt underneath...no wonder Milo always got so dirty!  Our deck was leaning just a bit due to the land settling, so the first thing we wanted to do was to jack up the deck and make it level again.  So, first thing we did was to dig around the posts, pull out any old concrete that wasn't needed in preparation for filling in the post holes with new concrete.  We used a few bottle jacks to raise up the deck, poured in new concrete around the posts and waited a few days (or maybe a few weeks, I don't remember) for the concrete to dry.  Then we just filled up the holes with dirt and proceeded to the next step.

We decided to do a little landscaping around the deck to give it a little more pizzaz, so next we dug out some grass to make a little garden area for some bushes. It's not sexy or anything, but I do think it looks better than just having plain ol' grass there.  We bought some sheets of lattice at one of those hardware stores, cut it down to size and attached it to the deck to close off the bottom.  Once all the lattice work was done, I re-stained the deck and lattice to brighten it up a bit.  After staining it was time for some gardening, so we bought a bunch of bushes and plants to plant in our little area and then laid down some lava rock (same as we have in the front yard) and there you go, Bob's your uncle.

I think it looks much much nicer, and now I don't have a dirty dog everytime it rains.  Win-win.  It took a lot of hard work, it wasn't cheap to do, but it does feel so nice to get some accomplished by yourself.  Gotta love the DIY's even if they aren't inexpensive.  It was still worth it and I think it makes our backyard look much better. 

Before

After