Many Hands Make Light Work

September 2005

Or what happens when your friends ask for help and there is tools and taking things apart with a crowbar involved.

Bill and Evelyn Wesson requested some assistance rebuilding Bill's mother's deck.  The deck at Jean's place on Lake Gaston needed some real help. Here Bill and I are looking at the current state of the dock and thinking about how the repair will get done. 

We started very early in the morning on the first Saturday.  It was a very pretty and nicely warm day.

Had never been up to Jean's place so we followed Bill all the way there.  A mix of little two lane roads running north and east from Zebulon to get there.

Starting to stare at the situation and see just what it is that we have to accomplish.

Trying to decide where to start and how to start.  And what is the best way to make a solid dock out of this.

Deconstruction started.  We decided to work our way out from the fixed point of the beginning of the dock.  The shape of the whole thing was not quite square or level.  We picked to start at the dock steps and run out from there.  We decided to use the same general idea of running the boards lengthwise but instead of having a board across the center as you can see above, we would build a box using two stringers on the sides to carry load and a center vertical brace making for a more stable platform. As soon as we really got good and started we discovered that most of the 2x6 in the deck and supports was completely worn out.  We ended up stripping off everything from the 4x4 posts and re-using only the posts.

Rip, tear, bash, get the nails, ouch don't step on them.

Mivon, Bill and Evelyn were helping a lot but Mivon kept shooting pictures of me :-) Lots of nails pulled from many many 2 x 6 boards that day.

Here we are making forward progress.  See the shape of the repair design.

Making more progress.  Stacked all the 2x6 boards on the new dock and working forward.  We all had been working at this for several hours at this point.  Making progress the best we could.

Bill had this great idea to make it possible to get on the pontoon boat from the front as well.  Here we are looking at how to make this work correctly. 

We quit for the day shortly after this. 

On the next weekend when we got there, we discovered a problem.  The weight of the stacked 2x6 which was very wet was enough to force the dock downward and push out the 4x4 posts, ripping out the screws put in the previous week and dropping the built dock sections down several inches to over a foot.  I was embarrassed.  I should have thought of that. 

Now this Saturday morning we were supposed to get a lot of help and here I am staring at a mess that I really didn't want anyone else to see :-)

With careful use of lifting straps, moving a lot of lumber and scrambling around, I fixed the broken dock sections, reinforced what was coming apart and get back to a normal looking project before anyone else showed up.  The 4x4's needed cross bracing.  They were going to get it now.

You can see the leftovers from the old dock out at the end, that the crew was going to work on destroying and replacing this day.

Here we are taking it apart.

And more destruction.  We really did take it down to just the posts.

Putting it back together.

Mind you this is the point where we discovered that the deck truly was not square at all.  I had such a curve in the stringers here that I spent quite a while finding a solution that would work.  It finally occurred to me that if you can't see it and the boards are solidly supported, who cares if it isn't quite square under the covers.

We didn't quite finish that weekend day, but got close.  The following weekend we got it done before it got too cold to finish.

Here we start by building the new steps as it is just too cold to go swimming in the lake this morning.  It is supposed to warm up and we really wanted it to.

Getting ready to put the deck together out on the main area.  All the frame got finished the previous weekend.  Note the curve in the stringers.  Wow!

It was really cold in the water finishing off the deck.  Here we are building the ladder to climb onto the dock from the water.  Almost all done.

Celebrating the completed deck!  Jean now has a nice deck to use.

Dewalt makes a nice drill.  Both the drills above pictured have gone swimming twice in the lake as part of this project.  Nothing intentional but they kept going.  A year later they are not the most healthy but they still go.

All in all a great project to build! 

PS:  Now that we have a boat and go to the lake, Jean likes us to visit and use the dock.  We have made a final modification during the 4th of July weekend.  The outside of the port side of the dock has been boarded up using 4 courses of 2x6 double thick to use as a docking location for any boat.  Cleats have been added to tie up to and fenders placed so that damage can be managed.

The dock is now very neat.

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