Decking Project around pool

Hi guys,

I finally finished my decking project a few weeks ago and thought Id get around to sharing my experiences with everyone here after I found so much useful info here myself when starting this project.

A big thanks to everyone who contributes here because it's a massive help to people like me who want to get into these projects but run across some tricky hurdles.

The project

I wanted to deck around our pool to replace the dying grass and mud to make for a nicer entertaining area when we have mates around for barbies and drinks.

The area is about 5.4 in length and 3.5 in width at the longest point. The deck is far from square so I'll let the pics do the work of showing the layout.

The major materials I used were

Bearers are 90 x 90 H4 Treated Pine
Joists are 90 x 45
Decking is Yellow Balau 90 x 19
Pryda Stirrups to fit the 90 x 90
Pryda Joist Hangers to fit the 90 x 45
I used the same 10g Stainless Decking Screws as shown in Raff's deck.


Here is the start after I had cleared a heap of grass, dirt and crap out of the area.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a282/Flint23/1.jpg

The ground was basically held together by palm tree roots for the first 100 mm down and at about 150 - 200mm down was solid clay. I used a single person Post Hole digger with a 300 mm Auger bit to drill all the holes for the stirrups, I only went down 400mm on most of the holes.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a2...edpoolpipe.jpg
I even found a pool pipe in my travels :((.

If I learnt something from digging these holes its that digging through clay in tight areas is far from fun.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a282/Flint23/2.jpg
Laying out and leveling the Bearers.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a282/Flint23/3.jpg
The two stirrups you see at the end of the bearers near the pool are the screw in type. I used these to get around the issue of pool pipes. I tried to dyna bolt some brackets to the pool but the finish on the pool started to chip away where I needed to drill (it was very close to the bottom edge of the coping of the pool) so I needed another solution.

It came down to move the pool pipes or try the screw in stirrups. I went and got a couple and decided to test em out. I'm not sure they would work for every scenario but they worked an absolute treat for me, I think mainly due to hitting solid clay only 150mm or so down they end up rock solid. They screw down about 700 and got really quite hard to screw about 1/2 the way down. I used a cutoff bit of bearer placed into the stirrup as a lever and bolted the two sides of the stirrup together so as not to bend the sides of the stirrup out and down when screwing them in.

The next step was to provide some drainage due to the deck being effectively on the ground and not having much ventilation underneath also this part of the yard is quite low. I wanted to make sure the water would drain away after a bit of heavy rain so I went about digging channels between all the bearers in which I could lay some slotted ag pipe.

to be cont...


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