I used fresh Meyer Zoysia from Summit Hall Turf Farm out in Poolesville, MD once again, except this time I went out to pick it up myself with a special helper.

By the way, there are few places more beautiful and serene in the DC area than the Summit Hall farm just north of the Potomac River on a quiet Saturday. Immense wide open spaces of green as far as you can see during harvest season in the spring. With the river just on the other side of the stand of trees to the south.

The sod went in like a champ though I had a heck of a time finding a turf roller to rent. Someone had taken the only one for rent at the DC Home Depot for the better part of a month and I ended up driving out to MD to find one to rent.

The grass did great last year and got thoroughly established.

As the weeds predictably started to pop up in this second year, I found a *good* concentrated weed killer that I used as the Zoysia started to come back from dormancy. It’s concentrated stuff — just a few tablespoons per gallon or two of water to spread across the entire yard.

Whatever it was, though, wasn’t enough, because the weeds just continued springing forth, though no clover or milkweed, so maybe it did work in part. I got loads of something else I didn’t quite recognize. By the time I realized that the weed killer didn’t do a thing, I was knee deep in a busy work schedule and then we had a nonstop week of rain. After all that, the  weeds were bonkers and the Zoysia was also starting to finally emerge, so my options were more limited.

Which meant lots of weeding by hand.

But it’s amazing how much progress you can make on weeding when your mom helps out for an hour…

…oh and when your yard is only 100-something square feet in size. Check out the Saturday to Sunday gif.

Time to get the rest of the garden planted and rebuild the blueberry tree cage!

I.e., definitely not in this picture above, taken before we closed on the house.

As long as we’ve been working in this sole bathroom upstairs in our house, we’ve been trying to figure out how to handle this window. While it once looked (sorta) to the outside on the sleeping porch that was semi-open to the elements, that porch is now closed in and part of the house.

Over the years — before and after we renovated the bathroom in February of 2013, we’ve mostly kept it covered in some way. We’ve kept a curtain over it and even used a random red fleece blanket for a couple years to cover it from the porch side, both for privacy and to keep light from leaking into our porch and therefore our bedroom when folks would use the bathroom in the night.

During renovations in February 2013

I had been imagining some way to turn this window into a mirror, but wasn’t sure how I wanted to do it. After turning the porch side of the window into some new built-in bookshelves a few months ago, I first installed that fake tin backsplash stuff on the porch side behind the shelves, but neither of us thought it looked very attractive

The new upstairs sleeping porch bookshelves.

My mother-in-law left us a can of mirror spray paint at some point and suggested we try that to see how it would work. We used that a few months ago and while it looked pretty good on the porch side (at least when the bathroom lights were off), it still wasn’t quite cutting it and definitely looked worse on the bathroom side.

After taking stock of the opening and noticing the flush, trimmed edges all the way around, I had an idea: Let’s just get a mirror custom cut and fill the entire opening with it. 

After measuring it weeks ago and continually forgetting to order the mirror, I finally pulled the trigger on ordering the mirror (and one for a second job, to be revealed soon!) The glass place I used, Chevy Chase Glass Company up in Bethesda, told me it would be ready in a couple of days, and then called two hours later to say it was done. (That’s some serious under-promising and over-delivering!)

Monday night, after the kids were in bed, I went to work on the quick job. I added in a couple of “artifacts” with notes on the back to leave inside — as we’ve done on all of these types of projects around the house. I also left the old sash pulls inside there as well.

I removed the old window pulls (to make the sash level behind the mirror), added a single 1-by piece at the top to give the mirror something to rest against up there, and then carefully placed the mirror in the opening.

It fit perfectly.

For now, I temporarily screwed a little block of wood into the side trim up near the top to hold the mirror in place, but I’m thinking of finding a little decorative trim (to match the beaded tile accent around the room) to build a frame around it and hold it in place that way.

But I think it also looks pretty good frameless, as-is.

It’s going to take some getting used to, to have an enormous reflection staring at you where there once was nothing, but it sure makes this tiny bathroom of ours look a whole lot bigger.

I also ordered the last few pieces of tile that we ran out of to finish the tile baseboard over the weekend…which means just a short 28 months after we started the job, I will finally wrap it up soon. That’s how it goes….get things 95 percent done right away, and then the last 5 percent takes a few years to finish.

It’s always nice to finish a project, whether it’s a small one-off project, or part of a greater whole.

But when I got done staining the new front porch decking earlier this week, Rachel and I both took a look around to admire it. And then there followed an almost a palpable feeling that struck us: “Hey, the front porch is actually done. We just finished everything we set out to do back when we bought the house and it looked like this:”

Where it all began

Back in spring 2011 as the weather warmed up, we had to do a ton of work to that yard just to even reach the porch to figure out what the heck we needed to do to it.

So off came the ivy. Down came the fence. Out went the two once-small shrubberies that had grown into annoyingly-large trees.

With the yard cleared out we had a long list of what we needed to do to the porch. I mean, it was a long list, but it wasn’t SIX-and-a-half YEARS long:

• Rotted old railing and spindles that were falling apart.
• Old grey paint on stairs and parapets to be stripped off entirely.
• Repaint front joist; green lattice; gross beige paint on columns and porch; turquoise paint on ceiling; beige paint around window trim
• Decrepit old porch light that didn’t match the house
• Nasty old tongue and groove decking that had been painted too many times and likely needed to be replaced entirely.

After redoing the yard into something decent for that first spring season, I think the first thing I did was strip and pressure wash all the old paint on the concrete steps and that front joist. I remember about a solid week in early 2011 of putting stripper on the steps before work, and then coming home at the end of the day and scraping paint off and then pressure washing whatever was left behind.

(before and after)

Once we got all the paint removed from the steps and repainted the entire porch (ceiling, outer trim, etc.), things were looking pretty good that first spring.

Well, things were looking pretty good by spring 2011, except for the porch decking and especially those railings.

One day, with little plan for replacing it anytime soon, I ripped out the front railing.

I think I remember us being nervous that someone was going to lean on it and it would just give way into the front yard. I guess we thought that just falling into the front yard without the surprise of first leaning into an unstable railing seemed like a better option, because the front porch stayed like this for months.

That nasty decking did get painted during the lead paint bonanza of 2012-2013, so at least the porch looked a little better for a time. (And now I’m remembering that the lead paint inspection may have been what actually prompted removing the railing.)

In one of my more hilariously optimistic moves, during the week we were literally gutting the kitchen in 2010, I found a matching replacement top rail for the front porch at Community Forklift in pretty good condition. I think it stayed in the backyard until it started rotting and I eventually cut it into pieces and put it in the firepit sometime in 2013 or 2014. Well, at least we got our $3.99 or whatever out of it or, I suppose — it kept us warm for an hour.

Instead of that salvaged railing, I ended up buying brand new pieces to build one from Galliher and Huguely and installed that since it seemed somehow safer than not having a railing entirely? And once again, it stayed this way for months while I tried to figure out how I wanted to do the spindles.

The problem with the spindles was wanting to match the original railing (and my neighbors’), which have very narrow spindles. No one carries spindles that narrow, so they have to be ripped down custom. After one false start trying to get that done, I finally relented and decided I could make it look similar enough by just using the square spindles and spacing them closer together than you would on a standard deck railing. (Enduring lesson for us on home renovations — don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the really-very-good-and-totally-suitable. Other folk with more time on their hands or a home with more historic touches may disagree.)

In spring 2015, I finally took on the big job of replacing the old decking.

It was rotting in places, and rather than replacing the worst pieces and trying to salvage it, I opted to just rip the entire thing out and put down 5/4 PT decking. I flirted with tongue and groove or composite stuff, but opted for the simplicity of simple decking.

I just laid the circular saw into the deck and started cutting the old decking out entirely, leaving just the joists behind. Though I did get to leave my random handrail with no spindles from two years earlier in place.

I reinforced the joists in a few places to make sure it would carry the load for decades to come.

With the joists in place, running the decking for this one went pretty fast. All done in one day, if I remember right.

I changed up the design from what you usually see on the house flips that have 5/4 decking on them and put a cap board on the side against the house and at the front of the deck to give a more finished look where you don’t see the cut end of the boards. Doing so also made 8-foot boards juuuust the right length.

With the decking wrapped, I turned to building all three of the railings. This was the most monotonous part of the project, since I didn’t buy individual balusters — I bought 12-foot lengths of the material and had to chop each one to length and then miter the bottom end slightly at a small angle — the drip cap/bottom railing is angled slightly so water will roll off of it.

I think I had to measure and cut around 90 spindles total for the three railings and then attach ’em, which I think I did with small GRK finish screws on top and bottom. They were spaced out just by the width of one spindle in between.

I added a piece of trim below the top rail on both sides to make it look more substantial (and also cover the screw holes for driving each spindle into the top rail.) The bottom holes were filled and sanded before being painted.

As you can see, that spacing is closer together than you’d normally see on a typical back deck or other deck using square spindles like these. This helped mimic the conventional look on most other Petworth rowhouses with wooden railings, even though these spindles are wider than almost all of those.

A few weeks later, I painted all of the railings in our typical white which matches the upper part of the porch. (Painting balusters is one of the worst, most tedious things ever. Shoulda painted them before installing them!)

With that done, we had the deck basically finished, save for some sort of paint or stain for the floor. I knew I’d probably wait at least a year to let it weather — with the little sun that the front gets, it would probably stay damp with PT chemicals for longer than a normal deck would.

Turns out we “decided” to wait almost two years instead.

When I built the back deck in spring 2016, we knew we would definitely try to stain it that fall. As we picked out a stain color and treatment for the back, we found one we liked for the front and ended up lucking into a hefty Sherwin-Williams sale to get the stain for both jobs at once. We settled on their semi-transparent waterborne stain, though I’m reconsidering using a different product in the back after doing some asking around about the quality of that particular SW product. (Front color is Mountain Ash, I think?)

I ran out of good weather last fall to do both decks, but with the (very) early arrival of spring in DC in February 2017, I seized the early opportunity last weekend, renting a pressure washer and cleaning and treating both decks (and the entire front of the house) last Saturday.

Though staining the back deck will take an entire Saturday at some point, the front was pretty small and simple. While working at home this week, I took advantage of a 70-degree day to crank out the front porch over my lunch break.

And just like that, on the last day of February 2017, six years after starting work on it, the front porch was finally completed. (We replaced the porch light back near Christmas, which was maybe Rachel’s #1 priority for the front of the house for the better part of five years. I aim to please.)

Hard to believe that it took us about six years, but the front porch is finally how we’d imagined it would be when we bought this place in 2010.

And as it was back in May 2011 after ripping out the fence and replanting the garden for the first time.

So what, pray tell, is this supposed to be?

I always seem to end up sitting on the end of the couch that doesn’t have room for an end table next to it. Which means that I’m always putting my water or remotes or frosty beverage of some kind on the floor next to the couch, which is just a bad idea in a house with two kids under age five. So I was randomly thinking about some sort of shelf to go on the arm of the couch to create YET MORE BUILT-IN STORAGE.

The built-ins. May we never run out of spaces to add new built-ins! (And yes, I am stretching the definition of built-in here, but anytime we “build-in” some new storage, that’s a built-in in our book!)

I felt like I had seen things that functioned like this for sale over the years, and I was sure I could search and find some examples of it on Pinterest, but I just wanted to do something slightly original and not just a clone of someone else’s idea. So I just jotted down a quick plan in church on the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

Yes, don’t miss the instruction for me to “MEASURE!” how long it actually needs to be.

Plans in hand, that afternoon, I went to buy wood for it — just some ordinary stain-grade clear pine from Home Depot — and then started making all the cuts to piece it together that day. Thanks to the trusty Kreg Jig, I pocket holed the thing everywhere possible, routed a few edges (which I ended up changing later) and in short order had the basic thing built.

Built and completed enough to at least test it out with the best seasonal beverage in the world: Belgian Christmas Beer.

The main objective was something hard and level to be able to place something down on the arm of the couch. But of course, we can’t stop there! Figured it was a good place to stow magazines/books and a second little box for the remotes — once our kids are old enough to just leave them be without grabbing them as toys or whatever…

You can see some of the rough and pointy edges on it after first assembling it here. There’s a lipped edge on the front of the top piece, which I ended up routing back the other direction into a beaded roundover instead. The arched edge seemed like a good idea, but once we test fit it on the couch arm, we quickly realized that every edge needed to be curved and gentle and smooth and friendly to little kids getting to wild and jumping on the couch even though they’re never supposed to do that.

So anything pointy got either routed into a round-over, or sanded into a rounded edge with the orbital sander.

After sanding the heck out of a few edges, I dusted the whole thing off and prepped it for a coat of stain. I’d have to go back and check on the colors, but I think I mixed Minwax’s Provincial (we used on the floors there in the same room) and a darker walnut color for something that would fit in with the color of the floors but be at least a few shades darker for contrast. (And match the couch.)

You can see the beaded round-over edge that I put on the top piece here.

And I let Lily draw on one of the insides that would never be seen again once it’s on the couch.

With the stain on, for the first time, I tried using a can of spray-on polyurethane. With so many edges facing different directions and portions that would be way to hard to reach with a brush, the spray-on method seemed like a good idea. 4 to 5 light coats of poly and a few days of air-drying later, I had a finished product that was ready to put in place on the couch.

Beer, we know it can hold. How would it fare with a tumbler of bourbon? Ok?

Boom. Works like a charm.

With bonus magazine storage and a second small box behind that one for either remote controls or a frosty bottle of whatever you like — it actually fits a 12 oz. glass bottle perfectly.

There you have it. Other than staining and sealing it, a one-day project to add a nice shelf with storage to one end of the couch.

And the first post on the house since we finished the deck back in the spring! Whoa! I’ve got a few projects from the summer and fall to chronicle here. We’ll get to those eventually.

It took just a little longer than I was hoping, but I got it 90% finished over the weekend, with just another 4-6 hours over Monday and Tuesday to finish it up. There are still a couple small things outstanding, but the deck is otherwise complete. But before we get there, let’s pick back up where we left off.

After solving the complications presented by joining up the new deck platform to the old severely sloped small landing, we were ready for the decking! And this is where it started to feel like a real deck. I moved the 5/4″ deck boards (in 16′ lengths) up onto the joists and at least I could finally walk around on top of the deck without having to do a circus act across the joists.

I started by attaching the first board all the way out at the end of the deck furthest from the house. I overhung it by 3/4″ or so over the band board at the front of the deck and then measured back to the house to ensure it was perfectly parallel to the house — or as best as possible with a back wall of the house that ain’t square itself. I didn’t do the best job measuring the space to ensure the last board would sit up against the house but we’ll get to that later.

With the first board in place, it was all just a laborious matter of rinse and repeat all the way across the surface of the deck.

After my great experience on the front porch with it (the story of which I’ve never shared on here, I realized) and seeing it in use on some other decks, I used the Kreg deck jig for the decking. For those of you familiar with Kreg’s pocket-hole jigs or others, they do a great job of finding ingenious solutions to carpentry problems. The deck jig allows you to put the screws in the perfect spot at the perfect angle on the side of the deck boards so the top surface is completely unmarred by screw or nail holes. They’re hidden in the sides.

I can’t recommend this thing enough.

You simply use the provided drill bit set to the proper depth with a collar, and then move it along the deck board and pre-drill holes at the joists. And then you can either use the jig again (with a second drill works best) to drive the screws into the holes. I opt to just drive the screws in without the jig — the holes are easy to find and it’s easy enough to hit the right depth and trying to get the screws and the bit into the holes on the jig is just way too time-consuming.

After doing a few boards, I got a pretty good rhythm of drilling all the holes all the way down to one end, and then coming all the way back to do the holes on the other side. I grabbed Rachel’s gardening cushion to save my knees, which were getting bruised and rubbed raw pretty quick.

With the holes all pre-drilled on each board, then I’d fasten that board in place.

I used Kreg’s screws since I was making a big Amazon order anyway, but you can use GRK or Deckmate or whatever fasteners you prefer, as long as they have the small profile head since they’re meant to go slightly below the board surface. I used Deckmates on the front porch.

The jig comes with some spacers to space the boards out properly, but in my experience, the smallest ones are waaaaay too wide for pressure treated deck boards that are almost certainly going to shrink significantly as they dry out. Instead, I use 10d nails to space the boards out only slightly. And rather than losing nails all day long that drop between the boards or trying to pry them out after you set a board, I recommend driving two or three into a short length of wood. Then you can drop it in and easily pull it out afterward.

And lastly, I could not have done the job without this amazing board-bending tool to keep the boards straight and help wrest the warped boards into a straight line.

You hook it over a joist and then use leverage to bend the board into place while you screw it down, helping you put even the most crooked, warped board onto the deck in a straight line.

As I started fastening the boards in place, I got a really good rhythm down (after usually starting by attaching the ends of each board.)

I’d drop in the spacer board 2-3 joists to my left (working right to left), attach the board-bender to my left, bend it into place, hold it with my knee or foot and put a screw in on the opposite side of me to push it into place. I found the board-bender to be useful for even just holding a straight board in place against the spacer while screwing it.

In this next photo, you can see the spacer board in place to my left, and I’m holding the board bender in place with my hand and dropping the screw in at the same time.

Oh, and there’s the blue Kreg jig to the left in the photo above waiting to help drill the holes in the next deck board. After a solid 2-3 hours of this on Sunday, by late in the day I had all the deck boards in place, which really makes the deck feel like it’s nearly done.

Well, almost all the deck boards. I ended up with a little bit of wonky space by the house I’ll have to fill. Didn’t quite get my measurements right to either set the last full deck board against the house, or leave the bulk of a board space so the ripping would be easier. I’ll still have to rip a tiny piece to fit in there all the way along the house.

But I did go ahead and drop a bead of silicone in there just to be sure no water can get in between that piece of PVC trim and the concrete slab below it, helping rain to run off to the ground. Our house is a little different than most, and if your ledger board is actually attached to a wood joist inside the house or breaking the outer seal of the house, you’ll need to do more flashing and waterproofing that we don’t have to do. But this will ensure that no water can get in the small seam on top of the concrete slab.

After the decking was in, I snapped a chalk line down the end of the boards that were overhanging on the side and then trimmed them all to a 1/2″ overhang or so with the circular saw. No need to pre-cut your deck boards, and this way you can ensure they’re all lined up perfectly.

With the decking done, the only thing remaining was the railing, and though I made some progress on Sunday night before the end of the weekend, I ultimately had to finish it Monday and Tuesday. Attempting to finish this entire deck in a weekend was probably insane, but possibly do-able if I hadn’t had to spend so long on Saturday with the joist issue on the old deck.

But late Sunday I got all the railing posts measured and cut. After using used the jigsaw to cut out spaces for them in the decking where the decking overlaps the rim joist or band board below, I screwed all seven 4x4s into place to hold them temporarily until they could be bolted in.

I leveled the posts out on both sides, and then attached the 2x4s to hold them there until I could bolt them to the deck joists underneath. In addition to keeping the railing posts from moving out of level until I could bolt them in place, the 2x4s will ultimately hold up the top flat railing and provide the contact point for the balusters.

After daydreaming about finishing the deck all day at work on Monday, I raced home at 5:30 and immediately started working so we’d have a railing safe enough to let the kids outside on it. I first used three pieces of 5/4 decking to do the top flat portion of the railing. It simply lays on top of the 4×4 posts and the top 2×4 that’s level with the top of those posts. Miter the corners to line them up and then screw it in.

For the balusters, after determining the spacing (4″ on center), I slid an extended tape measure back and forth across the gap between each railing post to see where the first/last piece would be and leave equivalent space on either end between the first/last baluster and the railing post.

Lily came out and helped me by handing me screws to pre-drive into each baluster, making it far easier to fasten them once I’m holding them in place.

And Jackson watched from the safety of the window.

I marked a spot every four inches across the space in the railing and then attached the bottom of the first baluster on the mark. I used the level to line that first one up before driving the top screw into the 2×4. And then I ripped a small piece of wood to use as a spacer which made things go very fast after that. Hold the spacer next to the last baluster, shove next baluster up against it, drive top screw. Repeat down at the bottom over and over again.

There’s the block that I used. Shown after the fact since we didn’t take any pictures of the balusters going in, apparently. But you get the idea.

Unfortunately I underestimated in my lumber order and ran out of spindles on Monday night. D’oh!

So early Tuesday morning before work, I ran up to Galliher & Huguely to pick up another 20 balusters and some bolts, and then finished installing the last of the balusters and bolting the railing 4x4s to the deck.

I used lag screws (left) only on the corner posts where there was no space on the inside for carriage bolts due to the rim joist and band board. Everywhere else I used 1/2″ carriage bolts with washers/nuts on the back (right) to attach the seven railing posts fast to the deck.

And to attach each joist to the crossbeam, I used simple hurricane ties down below on each joist.

With the railing finished and bolted into place, the deck was finally finished.

By my rough count, it took me about 30 hours of solo labor, not including two Home Depot trips, one Galliher & Huguely trip, and the day of labor for a contractor to install the 6×6 posts and the ledger board for me.

We finished it just in time for beautiful weather to arrive Tuesday afternoon, and the kids and I broke the seal and had dinner out there by ourselves that night while Rachel was at an event downtown.

I can say that this was one of the more ambitious projects I’ve undertaken in the five-plus years of working on this house. As I told Rachel, a little bit of confidence breeds more confidence, and all the little and medium and bigger successful projects got me to a point where I had no real trepidation about tackling something so big. I knew I could ask other folks for answers, I could find tons of information online, and I’d eventually find my way through it.

I’m really pleased with how it turned out and can’t wait to enjoy the lovely Spring weather coming up out on the new back deck. I moved the baby gate out to the deck so I can let Jackson roam out there without fear of tumbling down the stairs.

And now, a bunch of photos, closing with the usual before/after of the back of the house with the new deck.

Here at the transition to the stairs, you can see that the old railing was not quite high enough. The new railing is at least 6-10″ higher.

Here I am moving the backyard lights temporarily out of the way last night with a PVC pipe attached to the railing, until we can decide where to put them more permanently.

And lastly, the before and after shots. This first photo is from back before we really got started on the enormous backyard project.

And September 2010 (during our inspection) vs.  July 2011 vs now. (Watch how ashy and grey the stairs go in just five years from 2011-16. This is why we’re going to paint the new deck probably in the Fall sometime.)

I built a deck!!!

—

The back deck expansion

• The plan and the inspiration
• Part one
• Part two
• Part three

The entire Flickr photoset of this project is here.

After getting started Friday on expanding the deck by installing the crossbeam and pre-cutting most of the joists, I started early Saturday morning placing and aligning the 8 new long joists that will form 3/4 of the expanded part of the deck. (The rest of the landing will be extended out again by 4 feet for the rest of the expansion.)

Wrangling the 2x8s into place was surprisingly easy with the big crossbeam there to lay one end down on, which allowed me to just stick one end of a 2×8 up in the air and rest it on the beam. Then I only had to lift up and hold the other end to get each aligned on the mark (spaced 16″ apart on center) and flush with the top of the ledger board for a level surface for the decking to come.

Since I don’t have a framing nailer and decided not to use this project as an excuse to buy one, I used 4 to 6 3″ deck screws in each joist to hold them in place temporarily until attaching the joist hangers later on. After just about two hours of work, I had all eight of the new 8′ joists in place.

My plan all along has been to keep and use the existing structure of the landing. That adds some extra support for the entire thing with two additional 4x4s in concrete, the existing ledger board, and the overall frame around it that I was planning to connect shorter joists to.

So I ripped up the old decking off of the landing and then attached shorter 4′ joists to bridge the gap between the old landing and the crossbeam. To add some extra strength, I put carriage bolts in the rim joist and the band board on the old landing before attaching the shorter joists.

I also came up with a nifty solution to the “how in the world do I lift up this 16-foot 2×8 rim joist by myself and get it lined up with the joists and attached” problem.

I built two little holders that I attached to the joists out near the ends, so I could (similarly to the crossbeam for the joists themselves) stand the 2×8 up and lay it into the holder, and then lift up just one end and lay it into a holder on the other end. Then I could easily adjust the level on each end as needed before screwing it into place.

I also, of course, squared up the joists (measuring 90º in the corners) and marked the exact spot for each on the crossbeam before putting in the joist hangers. Then I screwed the joists into the crossbeam to hold them into place until attaching the hurricane ties on Sunday. By 4 in the afternoon, I had all the new joists, the rim joist and the band board in place and ready.

After ripping up the old decking, I could even move the 5/4 decking onto the deck and start dry fitting to measure and also have a place to walk and sit without fear of falling through.

This is where it got more complicated.

If you look in this picture above, you can probably see that the new joists to the left of the landing are higher than the existing joists to the right. I stupidly started building without checking the slope of the landing, which was sloped away from the house pretty significantly, and much more than the 3/8″ slope that is typical for some decks. (Water running toward the house on ours is less of an issue because of the fact that our deck doesn’t connect to joists or other wooden structure inside the house — the ledger is drilled into a concrete slab and waterproofed. I added some more sealant but this is getting more boring than this post was already so I’ll stop now…)

I laid the new joists to slope slightly away from the house, but at less of a slope than the old landing. So I had to find a way to get those joists to line up.

I ended up doing a mixture of just adding in new joists with less slope, sistering up new joists to old ones, and finally shimming two of the old joists where I couldn’t fit in or sister up new ones.

Here you can see two joists that were sistered up to the old, too-low joists. I added carriage bolts to ensure strength and stability. To the left of those, I actually ripped out two of the old joists and just replaced them with new ones. I couldn’t do that all the way across because of where the bolts were in the ledger board.

For the the two outermost joists that I could neither sister up or easily remove, I just ripped down a shim for to match the slope of the newly added joists.

With that problem solved, I then had to find a way to bridge the gap between the new joists, as the old rim joist was obviously lower than the rest. So I just ripped a short piece of decking that was the appropriate height already to lay between the joists.

All in all, this is what prevented me from being able to finish this project all in one weekend. I was burning daylight on Saturday night trying to finish these joists, and ultimately stopped because it was 8 p.m. and loud things like hammering in joist hangers would have to wait until Sunday.

But by early on Sunday morning after trip #2 to Home Depot for the extra bolts, hurricane ties and other supplies, I had the platform 100% ready for decking.

Coming next: installing the decking and railing and coming to grips with what was probably a hilariously comical deadline of finishing it all in one weekend.

—

The back deck expansion

• The plan and the inspiration
• Part one
• Part two (That’s this post)
• Part three

I never though we’d be getting started so quickly. Rachel and I have been talking about expanding the deck for months and finding someone to sink the posts and do the ledger board so I could do the rest.

I just hadn’t had time to ask around, get a few references, and bid the small job out. Turns out I never had to. I emailed an old contractor on Monday randomly, on Tuesday he came by and looked at the site and put in a bid, and on Wednesday we talked further and I made a huge lumber order for the few things he’d need and the rest of the material for me to build a deck. And Thursday he came and sunk the posts and attached the ledger to the house.

And just like that, I was booked to build a deck this weekend.

Let me start with credit where credit is due. None of this would have been possible without Rachel basically single-parenting for the weekend. She fed the kids, she put them both to bed two nights in a row, she took them to a birthday party and then to Baltimore by herself on Saturday, etc. etc. etc. She did everything for three days straight. So though I worked hard on the deck, yes, I got the rare pleasure of focusing on a single thing all weekend, spending hours by myself, while she did all the other 99 things every day to keep our house functional. And took care of me at the end of each day when I could barely move…

They peeped out the upstairs windows every now and then to check on the progress:

First, a quick reminder of the plan. We had a little 4×8′ landing with stairs that we had built in 2010 before we moved in. It was just enough space to have a small grill and not much else. So we planned to add a roughly 10×8′ deck onto the existing landing, giving us about 14′ wide by 8′ deep, and then the stairs off to the side.

In the picture of the old landing below, we’d be doubling the depth of the landing out from the house, and then extending that all the way toward that metal porch next door, up to the edge of our house.

So after the wood was delivered on Thursday and the posts were sunk and ledger board attached, I was chomping at the bit to get started. And Friday afternoon, I started straight away on running lines for the joists from the ledgers and cutting out Ls in the beams to hold two 2×12’s stacked together for the crossbeam. I used the circular saw to cut the top of the beam off, and then the sawzall to cut the notch out. (You can see the notch in the timber behind me.)

We didn’t space out the 6x6s perfectly because we wanted to keep good access to the space under the deck to the basement windows. So the first two are a bit closer together and the 6×6 furthest north ended up in the middle of the garden. Rachel harvested the herbs from that spot and after the timber was in, we realized we actually lost very little usable garden space.

With the weekend now behind me, I can say that lifting the 2x12s up onto the posts by myself was probably the heaviest, hardest thing I did all weekend. I doubt I would have been able to do it on Sunday after two hard days of work. I leaned one end into the railing behind the post (see picture above) and then got on a ladder and lifted the other end up onto the timber. Once I got the first one up there and in place, I fastened it in place with a screw. After getting the second one up, both were screwed together and then bolted into place with 5/8″ carriage bolts.

When I finally stopped on Friday night, I had the crossbeam in place and level, most of the joists cut and ready, and their proper slots that would be square marked on the beam.

My plan was to get up bright and early on Saturday, start hanging the joists and by the end of the day have the decking in place. I would build the bulk of the new portion of the deck understructure first, and then tear up and remove the decking and the other unneeded railings off of the old deck before running the short joists from the old deck to the beam. And hopefully get this whole thing done before going back to work on Monday morning.

Coming up in part two:

As I was reminded on Saturday with what ultimately derailed things for a few hours, there are always little surprises around the corner on these projects, and one took up more time than I would have liked on Saturday.

—

The back deck expansion

• The plan and the inspiration
• Part one
• Part two
• Part three

The entire Flickr photoset of this project is here.

I had a delivery this morning from Galliher & Huguely for a small load of lumber, and their driver managed to get it on a forklift down our undersized alley and all the way to the back of our house a few doors down from the end. So what are we building now?

The warm weather lately has been an inspiration, and we are pulling the trigger on expanding the deck. We didn’t actually want to expand it for a long time — we were just getting used to having a yard that we could use, and neither one of us were eager to cover any of it up with a new deck.

With the complications presented by two little ones in the house, we realized that we didn’t use the yard — especially for meals — as much as we wanted to. And with a front porch that was too small for the four of us, we were missing lots of opportunities to eat outside. (Related: I just realized I never wrote about replacing the front porch! Coming soon!) It was a huge pain to take meals down and eat in the grass. And though we bought a little table and chairs awhile back, they took up too much space in the yard to keep set up all the time.

And frankly, it’s just easier to step out the door into a closed-in porch space rather than having to go up and down a full flight of stairs to the yard. For the kids, we can put a gate at the top of the stairs and then let them roam outside the door without worrying if they’re under the house emptying the rain barrel or eating fertilizer.

I got the push I needed watching the house two doors south of us get flipped back in 2015 with the addition of nice big back deck. And I coveted it immediately!

When we were first moving in 5.5 years ago, we rebuilt the back stairs which had no landing, were far too steep, and could have fallen down at any moment. We added a small landing so we could move the stairs all the way against the edge of the property and avoid eating up valuable backyard space. Which also gave us the flexibility of adding a bigger deck down the road if we wanted, something we couldn’t afford to do at the time.

Our neighbors two doors down the other direction have exactly what I wanted to emulate, with stairs in the same place on the side, and then an 8′-deep deck. You can see it here in the background, two doors down.

So we’re keeping the stairs and the existing landing and then adding a new deck that’s about twice as deep as the landing, stretching across the full width of the house minus the stairs. So about 14-15 feet wide or so.

I went back to one of my trusted contractor guys — the same one who did our bathroom soup to nuts in nine days a year ago — to come and pour the footers and install three 6×6 timbers and attach the ledger board to the house for me. Both are things that are hard to do solo, and with attaching the ledger board into concrete, a thing that I’ve never done before.

And then, this weekend, I’ll start by tearing down most of the railing on the old porch, adding the two 2×12’s onto the top of the 6×6 timbers for the cross beam support, and then building the deck itself.

Galliher & Huguely, the best DC lumberyard that I highly recommend just up N. Capitol (actually Blair Rd.) near Kansas Ave, delivered all of my materials this morning. (Free delivery over a few hundred bucks) And this heck of a forklift operator managed to squeeze all the way down the alley. I watched him the entire time and he never even grazed the house or the alley buildings on either side, often with just 3-4 inches of clearance.

The 6x6s and the ledgerboard should be in and set by the end of the day. I’m excited to get underway this weekend. I’ve never built a full deck entirely on my own, though I’ve also got two similar decks nearby that I can go and peer under at any point. Check back over the weekend, provided I can even hold up my phone to take pictures at the end of Saturday. Planning on a workout!

—

The back deck expansion

• The plan and the inspiration
• Part one
• Part two
• Part three

The entire Flickr photoset of this project is here.

Turns out our neighbor’s flexible drainpipe coming from their downspout either has a hole in it or has filled with silt right where it goes underground. Which turns into a small river running under both fences, and then hits the concrete block on the back of our raised bed and then unfortunately runs back toward our house instead of away, around the raised bed and into our yard.

Ah, this makes more sense now!

I talked to her daughter this morning; hope we can get this problem sorted out pretty soon. They’re in the middle of renovating their basement now, and the backyard is filled up with stuff, so it’s not going to be easy to get to that buried pipe to fix it. I think I’ll encourage them to just lay a new piece of flexible pipe on the ground running back to the alley for now as a temporary measure until they can do something nicer or buried.

It’s probably not the best idea to actually bury normal flexible pipe like that — I used 4-inch PVC instead and just flexible pipe from the rain barrel/downspout to the ground when I did our backyard re-do.

The room itself is incredibly small. About 6.5 feet by 9-ish feet. Not a ton of space to work with. On the bright side, that means relatively low amounts of material like tile required to purchase. On the negative side, well, it’s a tiny bathroom. But the space was never well used, and our new plan is going to make it feel much more spacious.

In the span of about a month, we made the plan, settled on design and finishes, and bought all the fixtures. It was a stressful, busy month, to say the least, involving multiple trips to multiple bathroom/tile stores out in the burbs on consecutive weekends and hours gathered around the laptop looking at possible finishes.

But after a stressful month, we had everything picked out and piled up inside our foyer. (Um, and this is only after about half of it arrived.)

The vanity

You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to find a vanity that’s 18 inches deep instead of the usual 21 (or 23 like our current vanity), but it might have been the hardest item to find. There are a handful of shallow vanities, but most of them are also very narrow (or TOO shallow). We wanted a vanity that was no deeper than 18 inches, at least 36 inches wide if not more, was white and/or had a white top, and had the smallest possible sink bowl — I couldn’t believe how much counter space gets wasted on enormous sink bowls that you could wash dishes in.

Seriously, though, why the heck do they make enormous sink bowls on vanities? For some reason, the smaller vanities had even bigger sink bowls. Do people need to give their toddlers baths in the bathroom sink? Are they washing clothes?

That vanity could have some nice counter space, but instead it has enough room to bathe both of our children. AT THE SAME TIME.

After going to a few bath and cabinet stores and being incredibly disappointed by both what they had available (either shallow or wide but not both) or could order from suppliers (OMG $$$$), Rachel was suggesting that I should just build a vanity myself and then get a top from some granite folks. I thought about it briefly, but we really just didn’t have the time. It was a week into January at this point, and we needed to have it here when we started. And if I needed to order one, it had to get here fast.

The best option I’d found was a special order model from Lowe’s online for just under $700. (Some of the custom options were $1500-2500 WITHOUT the vanity top. So, yes, those were not an option.)

We loved it, but it was 48 inches wide — wider than the 36-43 inch range we were looking for, though it was the perfect 18 inches deep. After realizing out that we could take over a few inches from the radiator we were taking out of the corner, this new vanity would only end up a couple inches closer to the door than now. And Rachel was dead set on having all the extra counter space. Look at the sink bowl! Perfectly tiny!

The only drawback was that it was espresso brown, but we knew we could paint it easily enough. (I keep telling Rachel that after we put it in, I think we’re going to like the contrast of the dark vanity with all the white finishes we’re using. We’ll see.)

Tile 

Though we knew what we wanted on the walls and in the shower before we ever started (lots of white subway tile), this was one of the most difficult parts of the process to nail down and order. We wanted to honor the original design of the house, even if we were making some significant changes. Original to the house was honed 3×6 subway tile halfway up the walls, and 1-inch hex white tile on the floor. Here’s how it looked in the cubby behind the shower where the new tile was not laid over the old.

So part of our decisionmaking was easy: bright white (polished) subway tile in the shower, and then subway tile on the walls up to a chair rail. That much was easy.

Rachel loved these dots. She picked up a strip of them at Community Forklift years ago, probably back when we bought the house and always wanted to use them in the bathroom. So we came up with a pattern (wait for the reveal on that one) that used the dots with the subway and the chair rail (pictured below). And then a cove base tile at the bottom.

I priced out everything at Best Tile in Rockville and while they were great for the most part, with all of their extra shipping and handling fees to move things between THEIR OWN warehouses, I ended up ordering all the tile from Lowe’s for a few hundred bucks less; all from American Olean.

I made an important discovery, though, so take notes for those of you thinking of buying subway tile from Lowe’s.

Not only is the white AO subway tile they stock at Lowe’s NOT actually their whitest shade, but it’s also a special low-grade “starter” line that they ONLY sell in store at Lowe’s. You can get good quality (great!) subway tile from American Olean through Lowe’s, but you have to order it and get it shipped to the store. It’s $5.60 a sf, but a much better product. (The starter line is closer to $2 a sf).

For the floors, we really bounced around between a few different options. The first thing we loved was a 3×6 subway white venatino (grey) marble tile from Best Tile that we were going to do in a herringbone pattern. But it was really expensive at around $12-14 sf, and when we got close to pulling the trigger, we had second thoughts about literally having subway tile on every surface in the room.

Rachel really loved the larger 2″ hex tiles at Best Tile when we first visited, but they didn’t have the white venatino in that size — only the smaller 1″ size. It was ok, but at the high price, we didn’t love it enough to justify it. (I did like the 1-inch hex tiles though.) Right as I was about to buy the subway tiles, I had an idea to check Amazon. We had purchased our toilet, bathtub, faucet and shower faucet on Amazon, but it hadn’t occurred to check into tile.

We found some great carrara marble 2″ hex tile right away, though there was no way we’d order tile we hadn’t seen before. Thankfully, they sell small samples as well.

We ordered this sample which showed up in a few days. We loved it. Rachel loved the two-inch hex and the carrara grey color was even better than the white venatino, which can have some brown streaking mixed in. So we ordered it from Amazon and it showed up in less than a week. I was still at work when the UPS guy came, and thank goodness he was kind enough to bring them inside for Rachel and stack them up inside rather than out on the porch.

At 8.99 a sheet for a little less than a square foot, it was cheaper than a lot of options we’d looked at, and it was EXACTLY what Rachel had been hoping for all along. Win-win.

The fixtures

We managed to buy almost everything else on Amazon for this job. Including the tub, which at about $70-100 in shipping costs that became free with Prime, singlehandedly pay for a year’s subscription to Prime. I wanted a tub that would be a little deeper. I’m a tall guy, and though my baths are mostly limited to whenever I’m sick or with achy muscles in some way, I wanted a tub I could actually submerge in without sticking my feet 5 feet up the wall with the shower head.

I found a great one that’s 19 inches deep from Kohler, but Rachel hated the idea of buying a tub we hadn’t tested out. So on one of our trips to the burbs, we stopped by some huge bath superstore (Ferguson?) that had this one in stock. We each climbed inside (separately!) to check it out, which felt a little weird in the middle of a fancy bath showroom with gallery lighting. It was huuuuuuuge. I loved it. Deeeeeeeep!

The toilet is the same dual flush model I bought for the basement, except this one is the higher (right-height, they call it) ADA-level toilet with an elongated bowl. We haven’t tested the other thing here out yet, but after six months of having to bend over to grab a toddler’s potty seat and put it up on the toilet a few times each day, we wanted to try out this great integrated toilet/potty seat. We’ll let you know how it goes.

The sink faucet and the shower head/faucet both came from Amazon as well. We relied on the good folks at The Sweet Home (same people who publish The Wirecutter) for their fantastic simple reviews on the shower head. SH and WC don’t review every product; what they do is test almost everything, and then review the best of the bunch together and then tell you what single item is the best. Polar opposite of sites like CNET or whatever. Highly recommend those folks.

Lastly, the lights! Rachel wanted as many bulbs as possible over the vanity, so we were looking for 4-bulb fixtures for the most part. With a wide 48-inch vanity, having a longer fixture would also look nice as well. And with the wall with the shower head in it now going all the way to the ceiling but with the overhead light on the other side of that wall, lights on the vanity will help illuminate the corner with the toilet in it.

We found a great vanity light that Rachel loved at Home Depot online, and wouldn’t you know it, we ended up getting it cheaper on Amazon. And we found a matching overhead fixture in the same line.

Since the bathroom doesn’t have a proper window (the window connects to the sleeping porch) we had always wanted to add a skylight to brighten up the room. But I didn’t want to go through the cost and hassle of opening up the ceiling and building a curb and everything on the roof for a bubble skylight like the one we installed in the stairway. So we looked into the sun tunnels and after reading a load of reviews and watching a bunch of videos online, got a Velux sun tunnel from Lowe’s.

That’s about it on the finishes. Stay tuned for some videos and photos of the progress, coming soon!

All bathroom finishes from Amazon available below.