Finally, the front deck gets a badly needed facelift. In April 2017, our contractor was ready to go. The old deck had changed over the years from what I remember as a child, and it was ready to meet the high expectations of our renewed house.
This is how we started.
The initial tear-out in the foreground was done by my husband several months before and we had been living like this since that time.
And this is what it looked like when the deck was totally removed. I feel like we could have been (in my imagination) some interesting artifacts, but the only things they found were tons of cigarette butts? I don’t even want to know.
One of our big discussions with the contractor was what we wanted to do with the railing. The original deck had benches with a backboard around two sides of the deck because my mom wanted to accommodate a lot of people. (She loved to entertain.) But later, for some reason unknown to me, they did a remodel of the deck and reinstalled benches but without a backboard, which seemed a little dangerous to me considering if someone was sitting there and laughed too hard causing him to fall backward, they would tumble down the hill.
We talked about a simple railing with three or four boards cutting across the posts, but I wanted a more open railing. We considered wires running through the railing, but that proved to be very expensive. Then, my contractor came up with the idea of copper piping. He provided a mock-up as demonstrated above. Needless to say that we loved it and gave him the go ahead.
Spring had sprung at the Schmautzhaus and our beautiful dogwood was greatly highlighted by the new paint job.
You can see the bones of the deck directly behind the dogwood in the above pic.
But it was even more exciting when we were able to actually put some furniture on the deck…even when it wasn’t quite finished.
Look at that beautiful redwood.
Stairs not yet installed, but we spent time out there anyway.
New stairsteps installed on both sides of the deck making it accessible from both sides of the funky little front yard.
However, it was one year later before we were able to stain the deck. We felt we needed to stain the deck the same time as the back fence, but it would be several months before we would finish the backyard (the dark hole.)
Even the yard was beginning to look good…well, at least better than it did.
Now, on to the backyard huge improvements, which are still ongoing.
Keeping It Mid-Century 