09. Hazard #3
The pandora’s box deck.
This is the story of how one thing led to another.
Dumpster to deck
We rented a 30 yard dumpster for our guest house remodel — more on the remodel in a future post. Before we sent the dumpster away, we thought we should add a few things from other projects on the property.
The hot tub. It was icky. We had a quote for $700 to decommission the hot tub. We saw a YouTube video of how to do it ourselves. So we hacked up the hot tub and stuffed it in the dumpster.
Once the hot tub was removed, we had a better look at the deck.
Structural Problems
What is holding up the deck? It may be a little hard to see since the wood post is so rotten.
How is that beam so soft and wonky? Words I never want to hear about structural framing.
We knew the decking on top was worn, but we had no idea that the supporting structure was also so bad. Like the house, the deck had been modified and expanded over the years. One of the later additions used standard wood framing instead of pressure treated framing for the support structure; this is why the posts and beams were so rotten and water logged. We started with removing sections that were clearly unsafe.
Happy Surprises
We discovered that our koi pond is actually twice the size we thought it was. More than half of the koi pond was covered by the deck. Cool, we now have a huge, albeit defunct, koi pond.
Not so Happy Surprises
We discovered water under the house. Under the deck was a previously obstructed crawl space access point from which we now had a new vantage point underneath our house. We were horrified to find a big puddle of stinky water right below our kitchen.
Silver Lining
My superman husband crawled under the house to take a closer look. He discovered a more than one inch diameter hole had been chewed into our kitchen drain pipe. He fixed the pipe and caught the culprit: a big, fat rat. Who knows how long water and food debris had been flowing under the house. We had intermittently smelled something foul in the kitchen, and we were worried something was wrong with our septic system. It was a relief to find a relatively simple and inexpensive explanation.
Hazard number three is still in progress. Our next step is to figure out how much of the deck we keep. We had not planned on doing anything to the deck, yet. I want to strategize with our master plan and demolish to an extent where we would be happy to leave it for a year or two, or ten.