Brother, can you spare some screws? Part 4

Step 6: Screwing down the deck boards.

It's been almost three weeks since my last post, and this is what I have to show for it:

As I mentioned last time, you're looking at 82 deck boards and 2,460 screws (give or take.  Several were inadvertently dropped under the deck, never to be seen again.)  The three weeks in between the first board and the last included a lot of work at my real job, quite a bit of rain, several trips to Lowe's for extra supplies and some replacement deck boards, several other projects around the house, several barbeques on the unfinished but still usable deck, and a whole lot of thinking about the next phase of this project: the railings, which I'll get to in a moment.  First, please note the rather ragged looking edge of the deck on the right hand side.  Tomorrow I will snap a nice straight chalk-line about 3 inches in and then run my circular saw all the way down the length of the deck, leaving a nice straight edge.

Step 7: The Railing.

The main reason I wasn't in a huge hurry to finish putting down the deck boards (other than the ache in my back and knees after about the fifth board each session) was that we didn't really know how we wanted to do the hand railings.  Well, Google Images to the rescue!  I could post a picture of the design we decided on, but that would ruin the surprise, wouldn't it?  

The downsides to our choice of handrails are it's complexity and cost.  I'm not concerned about the complexity, but this project is already over budget, and this would put us WAY over budget.  But there is a solution, and the main cost will be time.

Enter the sawmill.

In an earlier post I mentioned that I used our sawmill to make the posts that are holding the deck up off the ground.  Now I'll show you how I used the sawmill to make the lumber for the handrails.  It began with logs:

The three smaller logs are white oak, a fairly decay-resistant wood that is frequently used in outdoor projects.  The bigger log is red oak and won't be used for the deck.  There's a fourth white oak log already on the sawmill.  All of the white oak logs were cut down about 3 years ago.  The good news is that they're very dry and ready to use (checked with a moisture meter).  The bad news is that they're much harder to saw than they would have been when still green.

Here's that fourth log being squared up into a usable timber:

 

Here's a closeup:

 

After each slice is removed during these squaring cuts, the timber gets rotated:

Once all the bark and any defects are removed, we can start sawing out boards.  In this case 2x6s, 2x4s, and 4x4s:

And here's a completed 2x6, 14 feet long.  Oak is heavy!

The wood is not quite ready to use at this point.  It comes out of the sawmill rough, so I'll run it through my surface planer both to smooth it up and to bring it down to the same dimensions as the lumber we would buy from the home center.

Total cost for the wood for our handrails?  About half a gallon of gas, a pair of disposable earplugs, and a kilowatt-hour or two to run the planer.  White cedar from Lowe's would have cost almost $800 for the same amount of wood.

Next time: Building and installing the handrails.  Or the steps.  Or maybe both.  Stay tuned!