Building the deck of the porch

The floor (or deck) of the porch had been put on hold since September when we finished the

roof of the porch so that we could work on other things that were needed to keep the sub-

contractors moving forward. Once the painting was done, most of the remaining work inside

had to be completed by sub-contractors (Cabinets, plumbing, etc), so while they were

working inside, we started building the floor of the porch outside. January and February

are not ideal times to build a porch floor!

Here is robert trying to stay warm

The first part in building the floor is to design the pattern that you would like the floor

boards to appear in. Do not draw the design on paper and then decide from that as the

design will look very different once it is life size. Spend some extra time and money and

lay out the pattern on the porch. Then step back and look at it for a couple of days, ask

other people's opinion, etc. We created a couple of different patterns and asked everyone

who stopped by for their opinions. This gave us a good idea on how to proceed with the design

of our choice (not the design that won the opinion poll!). We settled on a simple angular

design.

Here is the design that we used for the floor of the porch

The porch was built so that 2x8's standing on edge ran from the side of the house to wood

beams on the front of the porch. These 2x8's were what the flooring was going to be fastened

to. We decided to go back and add 1-1/2" pieces of wood along the top half of the 2x8's

where the joints of the floor would be so that there would be a three inch wide ledge that

the floor pieces could be fastened to rather than an 1-1/2 inches.

Here is a picture of the 2x6's being screwed into place

We also decided to go with square head wood screws rather than nails or regular philips/flat

head screws for a couple of reasons. We didn't go with nails so that we could minimize the

amount of marks on the wood everytime we missed the nail with the hammer. We went with square

head screws to minimize the amount of times that the drill would slip off of the screw and

damage the wood. We were also afraid that nails may pop out over time, so this was another

reason we went with screws. Because of these choices, it did take longer because we had to drill each

spot where we were going to screw in a screw, but the wood was only nicked or marked a

handful of times.

Here is the porch floor when it is almost finished

The final decision to make was to build the floor out of 2x4's or 2x6's. We went with the

2x6's for the added strength and also so we could cover a larger area quicker. We quickly

discovered when we started putting down the pieces that not all 2x6's are the same width

and thickness. These differences in sizes showed up where the two pieces meet in the

center. To work around this problem we tried to rough in the pieces before screwing them

all down. Using spacers so that there was a 1/4" gap between each piece and a paint

scraper between each piece at the joints, we allowed room around each piece for them to

swell and shrink during the different seasons. Our dad created the spacers out of 1/4" clear

plastic and they consisted of two pieces screwed together at right angles. The vertical piece

would slide down between the boards and the flat piece had two holes in the edge for the screw

holes so that every piece of the porch floor would have screws that were in the same spot. He

made up a couple sets of these spacers so that many people could be screwing down the porch floor