Pallet Man-shed, One-man Build, Building the Deck. Part Two.

The old rule is true: to build a house, you must have a solid foundation. The location for the Cabin had a challenge: the one side was at ground level, but 16 feet to the other side the ground dropped out by 6 feet. The accepted way to do this was to dig footers (36" deep,) filled with cement to support 6x6 solid wood posts, yada, yada, yada. Well the posts alone would of been half my budget, so that was out. Meanwhile I have an infinite number of outdoor pallets. Long story short: big slabs of cement pads, cement footers, and playing tetris/jenga with pallets.

shovels, flat slabs of cement pads or slate, 2,4,6,8" cinder blocks, both hollow and solid, and trapezoid post holders.

Quite frankly, the hardest part of this project was getting the material to the worksite. There was no road access and the site was down a huge hill over 200' away from the nearest road.

The first step is to put the footings down. they need to be level, in fact I made them so they tilted a little bit uphill. I just dug up the top level of dirt until I hit solid packed material, and then dug into the uphill part of the hill to until I could place a flat slab/slate to support then next level.

On top of that, I stacked the cinderblocks to get above the regular dirt level. The uphill level only needed a 2-4" cement block, and the downhill one needed a cinder block to get that higher. the downhill footing will need to be a lot taller to get to the level of the uphill footer, so adding more cement blocks is okay, but you can also use pallets once you get above the dirt line.

So I have pallets of all kinds of sizes. 4'x4' (or so) 3'x8', 4'x10' and the Rolls Royce of pallets: 5'x16'. the 5' by 16' drove the final decision to make the deck 16'x20': 4 of these pallets side by side for the top layer. The goal being to build up the other pallets to make a level deck just below that on any old configuration of pallets, with the penultimate layer being the 4' x 10' pallets configured 90 degrees out of phase with the top layer of 5'x16' (aka going the other way,) In the penultimate layer to the penultimate layer, (yeah that's right,) I also put several of the 5'x16' pallets to get it level. Shoot, I had a whole pile of the 5'x16' and the shop that had them said to come back anytime for more. If they weren't so heavy, I'd have done the whole thing in them and cut them down with a chainsaw instead.

I initially thought I would have to screw these pallets together, but heck they were so heavy and the boards ended up interlocking like lego pieces, they weren't moving at all. I just left them be.

Anyway I played back and forth for a while to get them basically level so that when I put the final 4 5x16 pallets down they were pretty much a solid deck right there with the exception of: 1) being butt ugly pallets, and 2) the gaps way too uneven and big.

This is what the deck looks like when its finished with just the pallets. Pretty ugly. lets clean that up a bit with my main building material and expense: $1000 worth of 1"x6" x82" pressure treated wood boards from Lowes.

Assuming your pallets are nice and level, the decking cover is pretty straight forward. First off cut off the dog ears you want pure rectangles. Next up, make spacers. you will put them between the boards when you lay them down on the pallets to ensure they are parallel when you screw them down. This is absolutely critical to making a professional looking deck. when the boards on the deck are crooked, it looks junky. If you have been keeping track, this is so far the only precision work I've done on the project.

I love the look of a 45 degree angle, so I laid he first board that way (oh that board was somewhere in the middle not starting at the corner, and I expanded in both directions.) Lots of people complain as with the 45 degree angle you end up with a bit of wasted wood, but heck, the boards were $1.55 each, I can splurge.

I use a string chalk line to mark the edge and periodically cut the overhang off on several boards to re-use the overhang as I went along. This guarantees that the lengths of the boards are irregular: This is the second thing you want to do when laying boards down for the deck to make it look professional. Don't make a pattern with the end cuts of the boards. Trust me.

This takes time, and is a bit monotonous. Has to be done. Actually my son joined for some of this work, and it went smoothly. The thing here is that I used deck screws on everything. This takes quite a bit of time but well worth it. Any kind of nail ends up popping in a year or two. There are probably 6 to 10 screws per boards. I think the entire project used close to 25lbs of 1 5/8" deck screws.

It's rock solid. No flex, no bounce, and I've tilted ever so slightly uphill, so if you put a basketball on the deck, it will roll very slowly up the hill. The tilt is completely unnoticeable or visible, its just the bubble on the level indicates it. This construction went from March to September, with taking July and August mostly off as it was too hot.

As you can see from the last picture, we are getting ready for the actual Cabin, stay tuned for part three.