Parade... Right!

We call this the Parade Deck, which makes it sound like the aft end of a cruise ship. We could just call it "the deck," but even that's too grand, since its average elevation is zero inches. It's not so much a deck as it is flat landscaping. A wooden dirt cover, I guess.

We have a lot of parades and street fairs here in town, and most of them pass conveniently in front of our house. Free entertainment! Kathy and I have taken to putting lawn chairs on the front porch to watch, but the porch is so small that the chairs block the front door from opening. We can either sit or enter/exit the house, but not both. It's awkward.

So we decided to build ourselves a little outdoor observation platform for street entertainment (OOPSE) that would give us a place to sit while also covering up some of the loose dirt in the front yard. We can't decide what to plant in the front, and the current drought means we couldn't water anything anyway, so why not just cover it up?

Hence, the zero-height deck. It's completely over-engineered, with eight concrete piers sunk into the dirt, galvanized anchors everywhere, and pressure-treated 2x6 lumber holding it up. And by "up" I mean down. Our lot slopes from back to front, so the deck necessarily is higher in the front than in the back. Or to put it another way, the deck itself is level, but the ground rises up to meet it in the back. And since we wanted the front to be an easy step up from ground level, that forced the back end below grade. So we didn't so much raise a deck as excavate it. This is obvious from the big pile of leftover dirt.

The top is planked with redwood 2x6 alternating with 2x2. It looks nice and should wear well. Of course, we painted it to match the rest of the house. I did my best to match the curve of the front porch steps nearby, but I'm not as talented as those builders. I did get to buy a new router bit, though. So there's that.

You'd think that building a tiny deck at ground level on a warm summer day would be a piece of cake -- it's Home Depot 101 stuff -- but of course Murphy had to stick a finger in our eye. Sinking the concrete piers was easy enough because the soil is very loose and easy to dig out. Even getting them all level with each other wasn't too bad, again because of the sandy soil. But wouldn't you know it, there was a steel rod buried under the ground exactly where we needed a pier to go. At first, I thought it was just a piece of scrap metal and that I could dig it out with my hands and throw it away. Nope. The more I dug, the more it didn't want to move. Hmmm... It was old, rusty, and about a thick as my thumb. And very solid. It must go really deep. That's a lot of metal. No problem, I'll just hit it with this sledgehammer...

Even with my biggest 16-lb. sledgehammer, the thing barely moved. It didn't even wobble in the dirt. But it did make a funny sound... kind of like... a water main pipe. Stop! Evidently this was the original electrical grounding stake that was clamped and/or soldered to the main cold water pipe coming in from the street to the house. That means it's buried deep and I really don't want to try to disconnect it. Instead, I got out the angle grinder (more power tools!) and just cut it off. Ooh, sparks! Pretty.

So apart from that, the project was pretty straightforward. And the weather has cooperated, because Kathy and I have been able to sit outside on our new "deck" almost every evening, enjoying the warm weather. All we need now is a parade.