I’ve had dreams of putting a real live deck on the back of this house ever since we moved in, but the parade of other priorities required to keep it habitable have always taken precedent. I don’t think we’re going to be doing any major traveling this year, and one of the things Jen and I have talked about is finally pulling the trigger this year. We’ve agreed on the basic shape and footprint, so I used an online deck builder to rough out what it could look like.

One of the requirements is to have a wide set of steps leading gently down to the ground, vs. the almost vertical set of ladder stairs we inherited with this house. We can’t really cover the entire back of the house without covering a hose bib and two of the remaining four windows, so we decided to go outwards and have the stairs drop down facing the garage. An area of 10′ by 15′ will give us plenty of room for a table and chairs, and a set of stairs with 8′ wide by 10″ deep treads will provide plenty of space to get up and down.

Using the deck builder and some quick-and-dirty Photoshop, I mocked up what it could look like on the back of the house.

Of course, the Lowe’s deck builder thing does an automatic calculation for the materials, and it comes out to over $11K. This is, of course, because the decking is all Trex, but we’re going to have to do some saving up before I can tackle this.