A week and a half ago, Frank got the permit for our back deck project — demolishing the 2 story existing 100 year old wooden sleeping porches plus the 1975 concrete addition and building a brand new cedar 2 story deck structure.  It’s going to be gorgeous when it’s done!

Here’s a look at the before:

On Saturday, our contractor, Mike, came over to take a look at the plans and figure out how much he’d charge for the job.  He came back on Wednesday to help Frank with the demolition.  They cleared all of the junk from our first demolition out from under the porch.  Then they emptied off our “white trash porch”.  On Thursday Frank went to work and Mike took down the entire wood structure all by himself.  I didn’t think to get a picture while he was working, but his progress was amazingly fast.  The roof was gone by 11 AM.  The whole second story was gone by 2 or 3 PM.  And the rest was gone, and all the debris cleaned up, by the time Frank got home from work around 6 PM.  Here are photos from the beginning of Friday that show the progress on Thursday:

On Friday, Frank took the day off again and he cleared all the rubble while Mike jackhammered the concrete slab — while it was suspended 4 feet in the air!  We thought, based on the amount of wire mesh that was holding the paved backyard in place, that there would be sufficient wire to help support the structure as he jackhammered it away from the 6 supporting piers.  We were pleased to find that there was rebar wired to the wire mesh, so Mike felt safe enough standing on top while he jackhammered.  At the end of the day, I came home to find this!

Today I had to work again.  When I came home, all of the rubble, including the staircase, was gone.  They were held up a little bit because they found some errors in our drawings.  But they problem solved on their own and determined where the footers needed to be, so they even started digging out the footers.

That 3rd picture is taken from the kitchen door.  It looks like a whole different backyard!  Now we just need to get the inspection scheduled, have the footers inspected, and then Mike will be back to put the deck up.  He doesn’t expect it to take long.  So it looks like we’ll be having Frank’s graduation party on our new back deck!

These same photos and a couple more are on our website.