This wooden deck built in Westville Durban was built in record time. We have been experimenting with new techniques of building to make the task quicker yet still remain accurate, neat and structurally sound.
It was a 35m² wooden deck with a balustrade on 3 sides and a gate. It was flush with the floor inside the house so we had to be careful to make sure that the door could still open without jamming on the surface of the deck. The first metre or so was built on top of existing paving after which the bank dropped about 1.8m.
We built the frame to take the deck boards first, attached it to the wall of the house using sleeve anchors and then installed temporary posts to get the whole structure level and flat. Once the frame was built, level and flat, we slotted our 50 x 228 main-beam underneath the joists and attached them. So we now had our joists and beam installed being suspended by temporary posts. The beams were in fact now just hanging from the joists with a few screws. We could then see very accurately and quickly were out holes, for our posts, needed to be dug in order to secure our main beam. Holes were dug, posts cut to length, notched, secured to beam and concreted in. Now it is possible to use a wet mix of concrete as there is no danger of the posts moving while working with them. In the past we have done it the other way
around. We have worked out where our posts must go, concreted them in, then cut our posts to length, installed the beam and then the joists. The latter is far more time consuming. By having your frame built one can very quickly see where everything must go. A lot of the cutting is then done on the floor instead of in situ. Using the former method one also needs to make a dry mix of concrete and stamp it in so that you can work with the posts immediately. Pouring wet concrete is much easier and
quicker than working with a dry mix. This part of the job, the complete sub structure, took us one day (35m²).
Day two was spent screwing down deck boards. Again we used a new method of securing each end of the deck boards with our 5mm gap and then coming back to screw the deck boards down in between the ends. See this video for how we did it. 35m² of deck boards went down in one day. The last part of building was the balustrade. It rained that day so we only got a half day in, but the total time to install balustrade was one day. Hence a total of 3 days to build the entire structure, deck it and install balustrade. We still used the old method of installing the balustrade by attaching our rails to posts and then installing pickets. Our new method is to build the rails and pickets on the floor, pick it up and attach it to the posts. This new method will be a lot quicker as everything can be pre-cut to length.
In busy times, as we are experiencing now, techniques that allow us to build quickly and accurately are invaluable and allow us to keep our prices down. Well done to the crew, this wooden deck in Durban was built in record time.
For a free no obligation quote, please call us on 082 496 5444 or use the contact us form below. Please also visit the gallery page on this blog to see other pics of work we have done recently.
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